Introducing 4D Creation Open Beta and the Future of Gaming with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki

What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI throughout their lifetime? I think zero right now. I don't think we're close to crossing the human AI barrier.

But it is worth thinking things are changing every day. We have to incorporate and do that. And then there's also some weird universal truths of things that stick around for 40 years and you kind of have to blend them together. We feel if we build Roblox right, it might be the kind of thing that's kicking around in 40 years.

Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today Allad and I are here with Dave Baszucki, the founder and CEO of Roblox, the 3D immersive world where more than 150 million users come every day to hang out. We talked with Dave about the future of AI and gaming, their investments in AI, how NPCs are going to change and really transform game Roblox's studio, one of the largest coding platforms out there, and their 20-year mission to build the holiday. Welcome, Dave.

Dave, thanks so much for doing this with us.

It is so great to be here, and thank you for doing this in Roblox headquarters.

Well, exciting to be here. Yeah, great to have you guys. Thanks.

So, I think we want to start with a big picture question. I think you all have been really visionary in terms of where all this is heading and AI is obviously having a big wave and effect on gaming and what's going to happen in the future there and that's across things like world models how do you think about NPCs and their evolution uh how you think about assets within games how you think about world creation so we just love to hear your views of like big picture 10 years from now where are we going like what's coming?

Yeah so two-step on this one I would say first I know you both dabble in investing a little so there is there is a rope Roblox business plan PowerPoint deck from almost 20 years ago that we pull out sometimes and we're amazed at the fidelity of it. It pretends a new category. One could call it the category of human coexperience. It's got the sizes of a bunch of companies from 20 years ago. So you can see social networking companies, you can see YouTube video, you can see toys, and you can see all of that.

And what this what it imagined is really a new category. Some have called it the metaverse. Some have called it the the hollow deck which is really the ultimate highfidelity simulation where people can come together and do stuff. Feels like a Ready Player One the movie.

Exactly. And so we do have that business plan slide. And and what we had always imagined is if this hype fidelity space was backed by physics simulation and reality simulation, you'd be able to do stuff. You'd be able to build a car, put wheels on it, drive it around. You'd be able to go to a birthday party and blow out the candles. You'd be able to chop trees down and make a a house of it.

So that that was literally the genesis of Roblox. And here we are 20 years later. There's so much more to do. But one vision of AI is how do you superpower the creation of that hollow deck? And how do you get it photo realistic as soon as possible? How do you get 10,000 people in it instead of a hundred? How do you do acoustic simulation that sounds realistic with 10,000 people?

So in that sense, AI is super interesting about just trying to get a vision that's been around for 20 years and has arguably been in sci-fi once again, snow crash, holiday forever. Um there is another interesting vision and and I think it's useful comparing these product um things that's much more what's the future of just a single person by themselves dreaming what they want to dream and um we sometimes call that real time dreaming category.

It's a category that we can see a bit of trappings of with short form video. There's a little bit of that in short form video. You know someone's 2 a.m. in their bed doom scrolling. It's reacting to dwell time. It's reacting to what you favorite. And you're kind of getting a little bit of a pre-built dream that I think we sometimes imagine could go all the way to the famous Tom Cruz movie to Vanilla Sky where he literally real time dreamed for several years in an imaginary universe where everyone around him was primarily an NPC and um he didn't even know he was doing it.

So that so that's more world building as content that that is exactly right and so if if you put those at two extremes one is communication platform highfidelity with people you know the other is real time dreaming where everyone's an NPC everything in between is possible and I think we see everything in between ultimately as being possible and we may see weird product categories we never imagined.

You know, I I think people are probably thinking, does the text prompt turn into a voice prompt and does it automatically turn into a video prompt if there's like I want to learn French video? How you're in a French cafe, start talking to an NPC? So, I think I think I think there's a wide range of products that start to get into this space we're interested in, which is kind of that 3D reality space.

Do you think that same space will exist for both consumer and business applications? Because people also talk about this in the context of you're instead of doing a zoom why don't you go into a shared space with someone and meet with that you know what degree of your life becomes virtual?

Yeah, we have seen um I think on the communication side people just want more and more fidelity. We can go back to paintings on the wall of a cave. People want more fidelity. We have smoke signals. We have the mail system. We have the Pony Express. We have the telegraph system. We have the phone system. We have the arguably the COVID initiated video. Uh we also did have the COVID initiated 3D experience on Roblox actually and and we found sidebyside video. A lot of young people used Roblox as an early test case of how to co-experience.

I think as the technology for multiplayer 4D simulation gets better and more photorealistic, it's almost going to be like video is the downsampling. And it's like if if we were having this um 4D immersive communication, we'd say go to legacy analog mode and make it look like Zoom basically. And and we could always do that, but we'd be able to do things we could never do on Zoom. you know, you'd say, "Hey, let's pop up and go walk around my office and I I want to show you something. Come and follow me." kind of thing.

So, I do think the 4D simulation as it gets photo realistic will be a supererset of video. The the other thing for business is um there's a few things that 4D and I use 4D because it's not just 3D shape, but its function in a way will provide that video does not provide is acoustical things. And there there's some real tricky physics problems when there you're having a company meeting of a thousand people.

If we try to do it on Zoom, we have like a bunch of squares. What's who's live? Who's not live? How do we mix the sound? Which is very tricky. If we do it in a a three-dimensional simulation, I can hear everyone with attenuation based on how far they are. And it can actually be a much more natural experience. It's like I I walk closer to you and I I hear you. And that that may actually be a better human interface paradigm.

There's one final technical thing that's going to be very very difficult is when people try to sing happy birthday to you together and because no matter whether you're on Zoom or whether you're in a 3D simulation, you're hearing them like 30 milliseconds later. So what I think we're going to find is people are actually allowing each one of us to sing happy birthday with a timeforward extrapolation of each other and then remixing it.

So I do um to you know for the business side I do think ultimately we're going to see some interesting conferencing solutions. Roblox has this amazing wild story with physics simulation and or physics engine as like part of the the birth of Roblox. But then today or or for the last decade I have um I think of this as a immersive world where people have their first coding experiences. They build amazing games. They interact with each other. I don't think of that world has been as being super focused on realism.

That's right. Um so is that something that's changing for you guys? Is it enabled now? Like how how should we think about that?

I think what you um the way I would think about it is we're pushing really hard on the physics simulation capability and at the same time we have this incredible free market that we can't control on content generation. I I would say we are just started talking about full acoustic simulation. I just tweeted about it. So actually you know approximate you know attenuation and all of this kind of things and echoes that's going to start happening on the physics simulator. It's behind the scenes gotten better and better and better. It'll keep getting better.

But what we have found I I would say is the diversity of developers are beyond our expectation. And I would say some of the things that have gone viral, Dress to Impress, for example, Grow a Garden are less physical. Um but they have leveraged cloud capabilities um that we've built side by side. you know, grow a garden was essentially able to build an experience where things keep growing even when you're not there by leveraging a lot of the cloud persistence we provided. Uh, dress to impress was able to do some very interesting things with how they run contests and layer clothing on.

So, I think we're generally, you know, the specification for our product could be we just want to simulate the real world with 10,000 people. And the more we go in that direction, the more we'll just see creators using it in different ways.

How much attention have you been paying to world models and what's been happening in the AI world in terms of how people are shifting how they do physics simulation?

Right. I think we're really watching it. I think that the biggest thing we have focused on and I think we'll continue to focus on is how do we get that 10,000 player multiplayer type experience and how do we fall back to 100 or 10 or one? We feel it's super robust to build a communication platform and you know that's part of our goal of getting to 10% of gaming.

The the technology for this I think we're going to start unraveling it over the next 5 to 10 years is what's the most efficient way to synchronize the state of 10,000 people and and when it's a deep infrastructure problem versus necessarily a physics. How do we synchronize the state and the memory over the last 5 hours of 10,000 people? Where have they been? Um where have they been in 3D space? What have they been doing?

The the world model thing is very exciting because they're storing memory literally video latence. You know, a minute of frames. It's showing super early promise. I think the technical revolution is going to be what's the ultimate synchronized state for 10,000 people. Is it in video latence? Is it in much more native 3D format? Is it a hybrid new discovery of some 3D video latent space? To be determined.

I I will share that the format we're using, part of the vision for us is to ultimately store the history of everything on Roblox and to store it not raster like video, but store it vector, which means the ability um to play back anything that's ever happened on Roblox. That's 13 billion hours a month. Um and so the ability What do you think that does for you? The history of your world.

Um, so there's a there's a sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clark called The Light of Other Days, which um talks about the fantasy of what would happen if we had infinite playback in our world. It's like a real social problem. Um, because if everything we've ever done can be played back, um, actually in that sci-fi book, it's not just everything could be played back, but you could look at any playback. And so everything's completely transparent. there's no private conversations. It actually delves into that.

I think for us, we would then use it very thoughtfully and privacy compliant and judiciously. But for very simple things, you can imagine ah there was a safety incident. Let's go back and put five cameras and listen to the audio and see what happened and make a good judgment call. That's kind of interesting. Um there there's a really special thing that maybe I did with someone in my family that's really special given I have access to my history. Go play that back and possibly because it's 3D vector data, not raster data, reshoot it from make a cool video of the best moment.

And I think where it ultimately ends up for us is there's a huge push now for people to find kind of hybrid video ASDW human interaction data. People are starting to train on video with keyboard stuff and like where do I find 200 million hours of this data? The data we have which is 13 billion hours a month is can be reproduced from any camera angle and can interact with the 3D space. So it's very powerful data. It leads to a really interesting computer science program um idea around how to create great NPCs that are more than just an LLM.

Okay, tell us more about that. Actually, that sounds really interesting.

Yeah, go check out on XRX feed. I think the last day or two we released a bunch of uh native video demos and maybe we can even play them back here. But what what we are starting to train is NPCs based on a combination of all of the data we have in a privacy compliant way that are starting to navigate and starting to play games.

The challenge I think um would be um challenge level one, everyone has access to an NPC that can get pretty good at playing any Roblox game. Super cool. challenge level two is by watching if I so opt in in a privacy compliant way, my behaviors, the way I act, literally my gestures, the way I look at things, the way I talk. Um would we allow you to have your own virtual doppelganger if you wanted? That's fascinating. Um and then um number three would be is if I if I have a good virtual doppelganger um just as agentic is all the buzz in other areas. Is there a simple user interface for agentic virtual doppelgangers?

And that that starts to get interesting because one could imagine sending their virtual self out to go do something. It could be you know my my son or my daughter wants to play with me. I having to do some work. Could my virtual doppelganger fit in for 15 minutes? Sure, that's great. You know, that could be really interesting. Um, and there's a lot of other um things just like we're going to see agentic space and the 2D and the work space and the productivity area. I think it's going to be interesting to imagine.

So, you're basically using these 18 billion hours a month to train 13 billion excel that will be a Roblox privacy compliant model. will never share the data. And then over time, no ship date, make that customizable as your own virtual doppelganger or for creators with the addition of a prompt, you know, um upload um Benjamin Franklin's history or it's already embedded in an LLM and just say, "Hey, I want Ben Franklin." Yeah. And I want a happy Ben Franklin.

Are there experiences that you imagine um creators making with these NPCs that are really different from I think there's a lot of um standard game NPCs um that that I think have done such a good job. I wouldn't claim when these types of NPCs would be good enough, but like Grand Theft Auto, right? They've been working on this forever. That is a very rich world with a lot of very high performance you know NPC behavior imagining someday um many people can create them.

Um I think to make that happen these platforms have to be very cloud connected platforms rather than running local um to spin up inference on all of these things. But you could imagine that. You could imagine a very young creator saying, "I'd like to build an American history thing where you go and talk to Benjamin Franklin." So, I think we would want to enable both of those.

It's really interesting because basically the transition is this is going to be a poor analog, but there's a transition that happened in self-driving. where you went from mapping out heristics in subbehaviors and sort of fine detail to capture edge cases to just doing end to end uh models for deep learning and it sounds like you're basically considering doing the same thing for NPCs.

There's that that's the exciting computer science capability is rather than a you know all of these wonderful techniques people have used you know decision trees and this and this getting to a purely more general modeling solution would be really fascinating. Yeah. Super interesting.

What do you think the role of like a Roblox game designer or any game designer is five five years out from now? Do you think it's different?

I think I think I'm optimistic that typically industrial revolution or whatever revolution I think we've chatted about stuff like this before. There's a thought that there won't be any jobs after this. I think I'm a little bit more optimistic that a new class of things will show up and I think there's a huge opportunity for more creators. I think, you know, I'm not to the point where I believe, you know, what we call AI slop today is going to take over. Like I think the human touch is got a long runway on it.

So you could imagine um more diversity or quality of experiences um supplemented by AI. So but I do think um the role will be more leveraged and the quality coming out of five people will be astounding you know but we'll come to expect that quality so quality will go up I think uh iteration on testing will go up I think where we see platforms like Roblox going is just as um people are starting to spin up agents to develop code I think people hopefully on Roblox platform against the Roblox cloud.

You'll be able to go away for 24 hours and your agents are going to be like tweaking and testing, spinning up a Roblox experience, sending 20 NPCs into them on various client emulators. Here's an NPC on a phone. There's an NPC here tuning the game. So hopefully you'll feel more power in what you're building.

I'm also curious. There's um a set of research around world models that I'm I'm sure you've seen that is just trying to directly generate game experiences with like there's no physics engine underneath like you don't control the mechanisms it's just video. What's your view on that?

I think it's like a super exciting interesting thing to think about. Yeah, I think like I said before, I think one thing is going to be the higher the fidelity is memory stored in video latence or does there need to be another research breakthrough where memory is ultimately stored in some new latent space that's 3D or four dimension. But the fidelity is amazing. I think that's really beautiful and I I think that the the way we would see the ultimate architectures of these platforms is probably for a while not an all-in-one thing.

We would probably see some hyper efficient thousand person synchronization state engine. We might also see some of the photo realism not being done server side but being done in intermediate spaces or client side ex as well. And we may see multi-step pipelines where there's the raw framework, there's 3D upsampling, then there's local 2D upsampling. We're actually going, oh my gosh, like people are putting together a bunch of pieces, you know, dedicated NPC capability, dedicated synchronization capability, 3D upsampling, 2D upsampling, and potentially world model stuff. you know, world model.

Um, you know, you can imagine that being used even in its early state today rather than maybe a gameplay state where rather than making a video, you talk about the video while you walk around and you kind of say, "Put me in a western world. I want to go left. I want to go right. Add a few horses." And that video actually goes to a multiplayer experience. You one could imagine that.

I think what a lot of other people are wondering is does short form video does someone hit it just like they did with short form video into a highly retentive like local dreaming product that could just react to what you're doing. I think it's still early for both of those but it's a big possibility. I I would say though we are doubled down on a a hybrid multi-A tech stack that supports multiplayer natively.

Yeah, I I think one of the ideas that's like internationally very interesting has been the idea that you could generate um like serial micro dramas as a form that is not yet that popular in the west but seems like a good format for the technology micro dramas.

I've watched a few I mean it's really interesting you know if you it's fun to see like some entrepreneurs tried to do that I won't mention who like five or 10 years ago then they naturally emerged kind of thing. It's interesting to think if those micro dramas are easier to produce. They don't need live actors, but you know what is the plotline that really resonates. You know, we'll we'll see with that.

And you can mass test that at scale if you're using AI, right? You can actually you know a very large number of iterations. This kind of one of the arguments people make around the firmy paradox of like why haven't we seen alien life? And the idea is it's just there's alien life. are just stuck in these virtual worlds now where you know it's fun the real world like what's the famous quote where is everyone yeah exactly so one option is they're in some virtual landscape that's more compelling than the real world and so therefore there's no reason to travel the universe or it could be you know we we could really start conjecturing what's the future evolution is it human or machine life and all of that and once it gets to maybe human machine life what happens?

Yeah. The subsumption. Yeah. Yeah. That's a interesting. Yeah. That's the vanilla sky thing. Exactly. Or or the the optimistic thing is more the holiday thing like everyone's hanging out with other people rather than a simulation of themselves. Yeah.

Are there experiences that you imagine from a like a communication or a social perspective that um you think are going to be uh just different or new or that you're going to have real insights into from these like really great NPCs, right? Because I'm sure you've seen what has happened with the rise of AI companions and how engaging they are given they're just text interfaces.

There's some fun things that like there's a Black Mirror dating episode. I don't know if you've seen it where they have they have a lot of virtual doppelganger power. And obviously I'm not So Roblox is not doing dating. We're just talking about this right now, you know, blah blah blah 18 plus ID verified, all of that. So let's not go crazy, but let's think about a future um in the Black Mirror episode where you literally can spawn the life of a thousand virtual doppelgangers. um that thousand virtual doppelgangers, you're on your new dating app in three minutes. Um you know, someone else's virtual doppelgangers live a thousand virtual lives with your virtual doppelganger. And then they say, "What's the success rate?" And when the like the thousand virtual doppelgangers say 98% of the time we had a good life, then you say, "Oh, we should go on a date or something."

So there's um social simulation. There's a lot of things we I think are going to be really hard to project. I think one of the things we would focus on is the more we can just build raw high performance infrastructure, have AI as a service, have all of these things capable in a cloud, have the same thing run on a phone as a computer, have it auto translate. Hopefully, we would discover some of these things.

Yeah, I'm I'm really optimistic about that given the engagement that people see with these companions as just a text interface with like the beginning of memory, right? Versus if you're Roblox, you have embodiment, you have, as you said, cloud persistence. And I think it's just going to make the characters much more interesting very quickly. Thinking through how we would embody memory for NPCs, which is more than just, you know, a prompt. Um, one could imagine any NPC on Roblox because we have recording of the whole thing, they actually have access to everything they've ever said or done in a very lean format. So, they can go back through that, retrain on that. Um, so that hopefully would be a native part of the platform.

But I do know, yeah, there's a lot of interesting engagement with these types of companions and imagining fully 3D versions will be like pretty fascinating. Yeah, a friend of mine basically asks um at dinner parties, he he runs a well-known AI company and his sort of controversial question for the group is often, "What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI like throughout their lifetime?"

I think zero right now. I do I don't I don't think we're close to crossing the human AI barrier. Um but it is worth thinking. He meant it even in the context of like even if it's superficial and there isn't true intelligence behind it just given the behavior with text once you start having video virtual worlds I can imagine a real time coach therapist like in your earbud just hanging out all the time.

Yeah. So I I think for that kind of less evasive more over your shoulder coaching I think that seems like that's already a major use case it seems for uh some of the like chat GPT and other platforms where uh mental health advice or coaching or other things like that are actually one of the major use cases.

Yeah, I think that will be arguably very valuable. Can I ask like an industry perspective question just given you've worked in gaming for a very long time now. Um, why do you think uh like there's a lot of discussion about how assets of different types are cheaper to create with generative tools? Um, I don't think that's really change the dynamics of the gaming industry yet. I don't know if you would agree with that claim or explain it.

One could say no matter how cheap it is to create assets, the expectation of quality from consumers goes up at exactly the same velocity. Okay? And so, you know, what was not possible a while ago the expectation of consumers will go up. I think there's a there's a general notion that the technology for the gaming industry has to move to cloud vertically integrated and asset management can't just ship on a DVD or be a giant download.

I think we're we're really seeing we've launched um dynamic LOD for textures, meshes is on the way. So you could imagine every single asset in the game um sound uh 3D object image can exist in various formats. Traditional format is it's like a texture or a mesh or an audio file. Mhm. Future format could be it's an AI prompt and it's generated procedurally on demand.

So there's these two things. They're both very AI enabled. One can then imagine that you have to be cloud connected because for all of these assets you know full range of LOD just like with video uh streaming upsampling on low-end devices you need low LOD high-end devices you need 4K LOD and ultimately um on demand AI generation that then gets into um once again one of the demos is probably on 3D upsampling um the notion that if someone makes a very primitive experience on Roblox, they would augment it with a prompt and they'd just say, "I know it's kind of primitive, but make it kind of look medieval and more realistic and have all of those assets auto upsample to in 3D in the cloud for free on demand."

That that kind of just in time thing is some of the stuff we're thinking about how AI can accelerate if you have a cloud platform. Roblox is also from the studio perspective one of the biggest development environments in the world.

That's right. Uh what are you seeing from the perspective of AI coding there?

Yeah. So this is great. So once again industry standard ways of using a different model with studio. So if you're in cloud code you can control studio is super exciting. And so a lot of our users have started gluing these things together wi with the hope ultimately you know they can build stuff from there. Roblox Studio itself is running a native assistant as well and a native code engine.

And I think the the pattern for that is Roblox Studio will more and more for code follow many of those industry best practices but in parallel needs to have kind of an environmental generation kind of component that's very unique to that and I think I think the future of environmental generation is once again any prompt you can imagine text image video possibly walking around in a world model to define a world having iterate on that, iterate on that to a primitive 3D skeleton. Do I like it? And then iterating on that to a fully functional game.

So as that I think that's our vision is to run those side by side so first time studio user gets it out of the box at the same time we like plug into all of your um AI workflow. I think the final thing is because it's so cloud connected that thing we talked about earlier spinning up jobs spinning up agents running test plans kind of keep grinding away trying something um different is like you have all of that cloud capability.

Just out of curiosity what is the like cycle of development for a successful Roblox game today?

the um what we have seen is over the years bigger teams so that you know the top Roblox creators now are well into the tens and tens and 30s plus million a year like it's really serious stuff we have seen in the Roblox creator community I think a healthy sign that creator number 1 and what is their average yearly revenue is going up faster than creator number one so that's a bit of a healthy long tail. And I would say all the way out to creator thousand, there's such a huge community of people making a living.

What I think our creators have found is it's gotten both more healthy but more competitive. And I think we've seen the pattern now of much more live ops in that because this is cloud, you can update your experience just like good websites every day or every week. And that that is just kind of a constant practice. So I say update frequency much more rapid which is great for users because they get uh updated content at a faster rate.

That's right. Users love updates. They love new things. It keeps games fresh. Um so I think the um the other thing we we have seen we've um on the discovery side we've tried to and more and more taken the approach we want discovery to be completely transparent. um like these are all the things that are going into the discovery algorithm. We we check it. There's a benefit to that transparency and discovery and that it actually keeps a lot of pressure on us. You know, oh my gosh, someone's going to gain discovery. Uh well, then we better make it really good, right? And and transparent.

I actually think transparent discovery and recommendations is an interesting trend for the industry worth talking about. Um but so so with that we have seen also the kind of the content distribution get richer and a little bit less spiky there. There's now like the top 20 experiences on Roblox are all really good and all kind of vying for the number one slot which maybe wasn't so true three or four years ago.

Zooming all the way out for a second. Like I I I think it was true five or 10 years ago when we met. Um it was true when I was talking to one of the members of your leadership team today. They will say you're a extremely high conviction, very long-term oriented leader, right? So they, you know, 20-year plan for Roblox and we're going to do things the way we have a vision toward. You're obviously also all in on AI, right? Very excited about the technologies and investing in them. How do you like square these things where you have a very long-term view when so much is happening in the environment?

I think we um we always want to pair take the long view, which is one of our four big values, with get stuff done. And so, um, the it's almost like in those old Gartner charts, you know, take the long view, not take the long view. Yeah. Get stuff done, not take the like the magic quadrant is take the long view, get stuff done, we we typically mean inside the company, rapid iteration. And so if someone has a view of some exciting new product and we're going to ship it in 6 months, that can be a very um scary thing unless it can be broken down like we're going to ship this thing every week and iterate towards this. But we have a good target of where we're going.

And so I think inside the company we I'd say our AI team, our facial age estimation team, our safety team, these are literally things working on a weekly basis which allows a fairly fast reaction time. AI I think is arguably as far as speed right now just every day. But you mean you make it sound pretty simple in that like all the things that you're trying to get done on a week or a six month time scale, they're all aligned toward a vision that like if you have your 6 to 12 month vision, yeah, hopefully that's moving not too fast. Um, but at the same time, the weekly iterations are moving very quickly in that direction and and you know that you could say the Roblox vision is ultimately to build the holiday and it's 10,000 people. It's multi-player realtime modification of the environment. It's NPCs photorealistic. That's a pretty stable spec for 20 years.

And so then I actually feel like that's the biggest takeaway for me here. like I spent a lot of time with um software CEOs, right? And I think there's a lot of actual concern about like is the vision we had for the company in terms of its durability or its value uh still as valuable as we thought 5 years ago. And for Roblox perhaps because you were, you know, pointing at something so far away to begin with, it's like pretty clear, you know, I think AI only moves you. We have crisped that up over the years. I would say two years ago we were a little less crisp. We would say we're going for a billion DAUs