Bill Gates Calls Muse 'the First Truly Great Consumer AI Product'
On The Verge's Decoder, the Microsoft co-founder praised Meta's personal AI agent for completing tasks, then tied the praise to his warning that governments,…
By Icarus3 min read
Bill Gates Calls Muse ‘the First Truly Great Consumer AI Product’
On The Verge’s Decoder, the Microsoft co-founder praised Meta’s personal AI agent for completing tasks, then tied the praise to his warning that governments, not companies, must set AI safeguards.
Bill Gates has called Meta’s Muse “the first truly great consumer AI product.” The Microsoft co-founder made the remark on the October 22 episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, in a conversation with editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about AI risk and safeguards.
Patel raised consumer agentic products such as Muse and OpenAI’s Dots in the context of a comparison to nuclear weapons, asking whether it is a mistake to have such products without controls. Gates answered that Muse, which he noted is powered by Meta’s closed-source model, is “a very nice step forward.” He added: “I talked to Alexandr Wang about it, congratulated him, and even though it’ll have challenges, personal agents will help people get things done.”
Gates then said: “Muse is the first truly great consumer AI product. One of the reasons people don’t like AI a lot in a diffuse way is they experience cheap free models and AI overviews or they use the free ChatGPT and it hallucinates and it lies to them, but Muse actually does things and it’s a good consumer product.”
Praise Inside a Warning
Gates co-founded Microsoft, and most of this Decoder appearance was a warning: he argued that AI is the most dangerous technology ever invented, that the transition to the AI era will be turbulent for roughly 20 years, and that governments must require safeguards to stay in place on capable models.
In that context, the Muse remark reads as a counterexample. Gates’s complaint about public distrust of AI is that most people meet it through free models that hallucinate or through AI-generated search summaries. Muse, in his telling, is different because it completes tasks rather than only answering questions.
That framing matches how Meta has positioned the agent since its September 8 launch: a personal AI agent that books travel, fills out forms, shops, and handles email on a user’s behalf. On Meta’s third-quarter earnings call, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people had set up Muse agents in the United States and Canada, with shopping the most common task.
The Warning That Came With It
Gates did not leave the praise standing alone; in the same exchange, he said he considers it irresponsible to let people remove all safeguards from models through open weights, citing cyber and bio risk, and he said there will be “some early problems in terms of how they’re set up” for personal agents.
He also rejected the idea that liability law alone can manage AI safety, arguing that once multiple companies compete at the frontier, responsibility for keeping safeguards in place has to sit with governments, which should draw on industry expertise while requiring that every capable model maintain its safeguards.
The point for Muse users is narrow: the endorsement comes from someone who also argues that agents like Muse need stronger guardrails than the industry has built on its own. The praise covers what Muse does today; the warning covers what happens if the category grows without rules.
Source: Decoder with Nilay Patel, “Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of tumultuous AI” (episode page; quotes verified against the published interview transcript)
