Genspark's Stunning AI Pivot - Search to Super Agent

Is an "AI Super Agent" all you need? 🤯

Hey Everyone,

I’m not sure you are going to find a better or more detailed explanation of Genspark on the internet today. I’m a huge fan of the rise of AI sherpas (guide makers, tutorials, applied AI) on Substack, and today we have one of the best.

Is Genspark the next Agentic super-app? Previously Genspark was my favorite Perplexity alternative that could curate and search the web using multiple specialized AI models, each designed to tackle specific types of queries. It was blazing fast, had the best RAG and curated topics almost flawlessly from multiple sources with really great anti-hallucination alignment built-in.

I asked

Daniel Nest

of Why Try AI to take a deep look into this, as he has already covered Genspark a few times before.

Genspark is more Manus AI and Poe and Less Perplexity Now

But B2C Search is a notoriously hard vertical and just as You.com pivoted to Enterprise Search, with a more agentic approach, so too it seems has GenSpark deviated from its original mission.

Front and center is now Genspark’s Super Agent, that claims to be able to handle your everyday tasks, with a "Mixture-of-Agents" system with multiple agentic capabilities making their interface feel like a familiar potpourri of agents.

Genspark’s MoA (Mixture-of-Agents) Chat coincided with a $100 million funding round. The company was founded by former Baidu executives, and reports over two million monthly active users. Its seed round was led by Singapore-based Lanchi Ventures, previously known as BlueRun Ventures China, which rebranded last year to distance itself from its Silicon Valley origins. I was hoping that Genspark could evolve into a legit quasi-Chinese Perplexity, but now I’m not so sure.

The company is now based in Palo Alto, California. While Perplexity has pages Genspark also has spark pages. But, do all of these agentic feature miss the Search curation that used to be its best utility? Now Genspark feels trapped between Poe.com, You.com and an inferior Manus AI. But don’t just take my word for it.

• If you enjoy AI agents, Genspark is a very crucial AI tool to get to know better.

From Searching to Agentic Building

Genspark may come to regret their March, 2025 pivot. With many employees formerly from Baidu and Google, search was obviously their strong point. Cloning Perplexity didn’t seem to scale. Now that vibe coding is the next trend, their more agentic approach seems to be geared more for builders and not just searchers. This is ultimately confusing and their product-marketing was not on point on explaining the pivot (If you happend to notice at all).

Vanilla Genspark pre March, 2025 felt like a useful search curation agent that was really helpful as a research assistant (what I wish NotebookLM could have been). Now its use case has devolved into a Poe-like interface of agentic possibilities and feature over-kill rather than highlighting that one killer feature it did really well. I blame the vibe coding movement and some of the Chinese-American executives who think cloning what’s hot is the way to go. But am I underestimating how people use Agentic AI and Genspark’s features to actually accomplish tasks?

Genspark with its new Super Agent approach is betting on less Control (less predefined workflows) but with more tools. In doing so, it gives up its differentiation on the market and must now compete with a plethora of Agentic AI frameworks, tools and hubs and a price point that is more expensive (potentially making them more viable). But not all of us want to pay more for feature bloat. Genspark isn’t no Manus AI. In theory ByteDance could acquire Genspark and build a Baidu/Perplexity competitor, if they wanted.

Genspark says it has developed a feature capable of using multiple AI models that work together to conduct in-depth research online, yet its funding round is just one fifth of the funding round that Perplexity will soon have announced.

Do users want Less Control but more Tools? 🤔

• Less Control: Prescriptive processes often curb exploration and make it harder to adapt to novel challenges. Embracing more open-ended strategies fosters innovation and resilience.

• More Tools: Equipping agents with specialized modules for data retrieval, analysis, presentation, and communication empowers them to craft end-to-end solutions on the fly. This not only supports advanced use cases but also keeps simpler tasks lightweight and efficient.

Genspark has struggled to scale beyond the 2 to 3 million users mark. It has gone from easily my favorite Search tool around to something nearly unrecognizable. A lack of transparency about investors of the $100 million round and the actual price hurts their trust for me. Genspark’s Pro version costs $200 a month, while the Plus version costs $20 a month, if you pick annual.

Like Manus and its various parent companies, Genspark the product is actually by Mainfunc Inc. I really loved what Genspark was - MainFunc was founded by alumni from Microsoft, Google, and Baidu who are passionate about building world-class AI product innovations for a better world. MainFunc has its headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, and Singapore. Genspark’s MoE just doesn't respond the same as it used to for search curation. Now their search engine relies on GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 2.0 Flash to answer queries. Genspark could however evolve into a powerhouse agentic ecosystem.

Genspark is now an Agentic hub

Agents now have names like:

• Call for Me

• AI Slides (NEW)

• AI Sheets (NEW)

• Download for Me (NEW)

• Super Agent

• Translation (useful because you can change the model on the fly)

• Agentic Fact check and many others.

On the other hand, maybe their pivot into an Agentic super-app will pan out. Genspark might be the AI agentic tool that offers the most value to an increasingly wider range of use cases and features.

Genspark’s Pivot from Search to Agents is Extreme

• Today we continue our AI guides and tutorials on the best AI tools out there.

Let’s now get into the full guide.

Why Try AI? (Read it)

1. 12 Starter Apps in Google AI Studio: Tested

2. 17 Free AI Image-To-Video Tools: Tested

3. 3 Neat GPT-4o Image Tricks To Try

What to expect?

• Daniel goes through Genspark: Everything you need to know

• Genspark’s new hub and Super Agent

• List of Tools and applications, what they can and cannot do

• Tips on how to maximize Genspark’s unique ecosystem

• Breakdown of Models and where to use which Agent, history, tips & conclusion