New Delhi, March 14 -- If Chinese AI lab Deepseek shook the industry with its open-source, budget-friendly reasoning model earlier this year, another Chinese startup, Monica, is impressing many with its new general-purpose AI agentic model, Manus. Are there lessons for India?

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) lab DeepSeek disrupted AI with its low-cost reasoning R1 model this year, prompting OpenAI to respond with o3 mini and GPT-4.5. Now, another Chinese startup Monica has introduced Manus, an autonomous AI agent that's been dubbed the "second DeepSeek moment". Manus can not only analyse and plan but also execute complex tasks without human intervention. In just seven days, its waiting list has grown to 2 million. Currently in beta, ...