Sept 29, 2026: Su Zifeng bought Li Feifei’s world-model company for 55B. Manus 2.0 dropped right after, aimed straight at Meta Muse.

Manus 2.0 is the shock: 14 people, 67.1B valuation, now a real Meta Muse rival. Lean team, monster mark — that’s the Chinese AI playbook. Nuoyin Intelligence: founded one year ago, five financing rounds, another hundreds of millions of RMB. Chinese AI infra cash is still sprinting while US IPO math gets ugly. Claude Sonnet 5.5 dropped at half the price and beats Opus, but developer bills still explode. Cheap tokens don’t mean cheap agents. So what? China is consolidating world models, shipping Manus 2.0, and funding tiny teams at absurd marks. The trade is cheap inference and agent deployment, not Anthropic’s 281.8B annual loss.

Manus 2.0 is the shock: 14 people, 67.1B valuation, now a real Meta Muse rival. Lean team, monster mark — that’s the Chinese AI playbook.