The Dream of AI Slide Decks: a September 2025 Report
Who's got the sauce?
I make an industrial quantity of slide decks, like every good lil shareholder value optimizer.
This week I attended both a Manus and a Genspark event in SF, two companies who have a big thesis on replacing Microsoft as the tool for presentations.
Here’s who I tried, and then I’ll show you results:
Manus AI
Genspark
Kimi OK Computer
Kimi Slides
Gamma
Beautiful.ai
ChatGPT
ChatGPT Operator
The Prompt
You are a senior producer creating an 8-slide investor deck for an off-site content studio during NeurIPS week.
Objective: {capture long-form 60–90 min interviews + 10-min poster interviews; deliver 45-sec shorts near real time; archive long-form for later}
Funding ask: {range and exact ask}
Dates and location: {Dec 2–7, 2025; San Diego Convention Center area}
Daily ops: {8 hours per day; rotating hosts {names}; target throughput {X long-form, Y quick interviews}}
Targets: {sponsors a16z, Susa Ventures, others}
Value prop for sponsors: {brand exposure, opt-in leads, on-site presence, rights to repost, KPIs}
Compliance: {press accreditation when filming on-site, off-site studio is primary; adhere to NeurIPS Code of Conduct; avoid official branding unless permitted}
Tone: Spartan, professional, concise. No em dashes. Use numbered slides with 3–6 bullets each.
Output format: 8 slides titled “Slide 1 — …” through “Slide 8 — …”.
Must include: clear $ ask, programming overview, workflow to shorts, sponsorship tiers with deliverables, budget table with lean vs full, logistics and risk, team, timeline and CTA.
If browsing is available, verify NeurIPS dates and press policies before rendering.
I set this up to have opportunities for the product to have to do a lot of different work:
logo finding
budget making
respecting restraints (no emdash)
output format
workflow diagrams
browsing
dealing with incomplete information
error in brand: I wrote a16z not A16Z, seeing if corrections would be made.
Time to Complete Task
Every app was between 5-10 minutes, except for Operator, which took 25 minutes.
Every app worked but Decktopus, which failed spectacularly.
Additional Selections, Extra Steps
If requested, I defaulted to the base settings for every step. If I was prompted to select a style, I took anything called “default”.
Results:
No product here is great- yet. All show significant progress, but these are in no way ready for prime time with this type of short prompt. There are some decent attempts in here, so I’ll rank them and show results for each product.
Decktopus: F Tier
Decktopus served me a LOT of ads on Google while making this project, and yet their app crashed and burned upon testing. Was it me? Was it them? Was it just an off day? We’ll never know, as I will never use this product ever again. Their first slide was called “An error has occurred”- brilliant.
ChatGPT: D Tier
ChatGPT should crush this task, in theory- it has by far the most context for me and my work, and yet I give it a D tier despite a loaded memory and a Plus subscription. This is wildly below the bar of other companies 100x smaller than them.
Good:
very accurate: GPT5 instruction following is excellent as always. Very few errors.
sources: provided sources for claims it made.
GREAT planning: the best plan in terms of execution possibility.
Bad:
just chat, reworked: zero effort to make this a slide deck: its an exported chat, and there’s nothing even approaching a slide deck you could take to a client or meeting.
Manus: D Tier
Manus has built me many a slide deck, and I know its quirks and desires. Knowing how to push this particular super-agent means I can easily produce a pretty good slide deck: for instance if you ask it to code you SVG icons, you get pretty icons. For this task however Manus really didn’t do well.
Good:
great planning: did a great job planning out the details of the project
good text emphasis: Manus knows how to make the important parts of the presentation bold- by far the best effort.
decent icons: even without prompting the icons are good.
Bad:
PDF Export: if you ask Manus for a deck exported as PDF it gives you this awful long page with blank space. Should be a solved problem.
Weird Text: what is this Elvish they added to my slides?
Photos Unrelated: Manus fetches photos from the web for its decks, but more often than not they are awful. Example:
Weird Phrasing: Funding ask: $175,000-$225,000 with exact ask of $195,000 is a very strange way of asking for 200k.
Errors in Images: the plan is to have live interviews, but the image it pulled up is a zoom call. On one slide, there’s like a chart of printer costs? nonsensical.
Fake Email: Faked an email address never provided.
Kimi Slides: D Tier
I want this product to be good! When a scrappy Open Model lab builds tools on their own models, I want it to be great. Kimi slides asked me to pick a template and their was no default, so I just clicked the most neutral looking one.
Good:
Nicer Design: Kimi gets points for having some fonts and design choices baked into the template that I didn’t hate.
Fine word selection: Kimi did a fine job making this project sound credible: Kimi is good at wordsmithing and good at choosing effective language.
Good icons
Bad:
Poor instruction following: got way more than 8 slides, didn’t follow naming, didn’t follow rules of prompt.
Weird empty gaps: plenty of slides that are just.. empty looking? I can just delete at least 3 and the deck gets better.
Errors: Dates, emails, the fact its an “investor deck”- just lots of errors.
Inconsistent Design: On one slide Kimi nailed the timeline- on another, the line through the timeline is misplaced.
Kimi OK Computer Agent: C Tier
Kimi released an Agent today, and although it failed at making a PDF deck (said it made a PDF, but link was broken, and requested fix it didn’t do it) I screenshotted it’s work and made a PDF of the outcome, because the work is interesting.
Good:
Pretty: Kimi made this really pretty, despite not delivering slides in the right dimensions.
Great Planning: best planning by far.
Real Schedule: Kimi made a daily schedule. Great stuff.
Consistent Numbers: the early proposal numbers are consistent.
Bad:
Confused about Biz/Project: talked about an equity offering? Kimi is startup-pilled.
Made up Team: like many of the next few offerings, team was hallucinated
Basically a Website: clearly this agent wants to make websites, so a lot of this deck looks like Lovable slop.
ChatGPT Agent: C+ Tier
ChatGPT agent had a leg up on competition: not only did it take 5x longer to produce the deck, i used my account with full memory of what I work on and my preferences and context. Fully loaded memory.
Despite this, the output is mid.
Good:
Actual Deck: unlike the non-agentic chatGPT, this is an actual deck.
Instruction Following: GPT5 doesn’t miss.
Icons: great icons.
Bad:
Hideous Graphic: look at this monstrosity
Inaccuracies: Weirdly this was less accurate than the previous Chat entry. Why? We may never know.
Cut-off slides: Many slides are too long and kind of cut off.
Weird Sources: the sources are broken.
Genspark: B- Tier
Genspark delivered just what Wen, their founder, says it does: 70% of a good deck, that you have to finish yourself.
Good:
Pretty Solid Planning: The plan the super-agent made is good. Its not groundbreaking, but it all makes sense.
Nothing “Wrong”: Besides making up an email and URL, the whole thing is ready to be made into a deck. There’s no part that jumped out as obviously innaccurate.
My Editing Stack: I use Descript and Resolve! Genspark guessed right.
Intuited tool: I didn’t ask to use their slide product- just took me there based on prompt. Seems obvious, but others didn’t do this.
Bad:
Drab: no big risks like Manus, but no design really.
Export Blocked: I had to pay to export (only service where I could not use a free trial).
Minimal Design: Compared to Kimi OK Computer, there’s zero design. Its all correct, just very spartan. I feel like I got blueprints, not a house.
Gamma App: B Tier
Gamma App is our first “Slides only” tool- this is ALL THEY DO.
Good:
First Handsome Deck: This deck is cute! its colourful, the images work well, there’s a style to it.
Solid Planning: There’s nothing here that isn’t out of distribution in terms of planning.
Bad:
Branded My Slides: big ol’ Watermark.
Incorrect Dates: Asked me to start the plan in August, last month
Slop Vibes: it smells like Slop. Its cute, but if you have worked even a bit with AI, you can feel the radiation of the Slop through the whole thing.
Beautiful.AI: B Tier
This is our second “Slides only” tool- and it shows. This one impressed me 7/8 slides, until it hilariously hallucinated a whole team. I was ready to punch this straight into S tier, until I saw this hilarious collection of fake individuals with a promised timeline that never appears:
Good:
Looks Actually Great: some of these slides are presentation-ready. Solid.
Sexy Fonts: Half these tools pretend that fonts don’t exist. They nailed it.
Nailed the Icons: Great icons. best of the batch.
Finally, Logos: it found logos! with transparent backgrounds! Super impressed.
Bad:
Team Slide Fail: Compared to the rest of the deck, this is hilariously bad. The photos are even like clearly real people that its stolen from the internet, with cropping issues, colour issues- the whole gambit. How it made amazing AND terrible slides is a real mystery.
Slop Conclusion: For a casual reader the last slide is fine, but if you deep dive it even a bit its god-awful.
Math ain’t Mathin’: The math on their fundraising is not… well… not great.
Parting Thoughts
This was a fun 2h of tool use testing- we’re far from great, but i expect by next year I’ll be making good decks from prompts. Hats off to the people who are hard at work on this problem; keep going! We’re kind of close!
Do you want to do NeurIPS.tv?
If you’re into the project that these slides are about, reach out: caithrin@caithrin.com or @caithrin on twitter.