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? What’s Manus and why is it the news? 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…