2025/7/18 --Yichao 'Peak' JiAt the very beginning of the Manus project, my team and I faced a key decision: should we train an end-to-end agentic model using open-source foundations, or build an agent on top of the in-context learning abilities of frontier models?Back in my first decade in NLP, we didn't have the luxury of that choice. In the distant days of BERT (yes, it's been seven years), models had to be fine-tuned—and evaluated—before they could transfer to a new task. That process ofte...