Roblox CEO: We Want AI To Generate Full Games — With David Baszucki

0:00Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki joins us to talk about creating games with generative AI, safety on the platform, and whether you should give your kids money to play with on Roblox. That's coming up right after this.

0:42Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki. He is the CEO of a very large app with 85 million daily active users across 190 countries. They're not all children. 60 % are over 13 years old. So we'll talk about the appeal of the platform, the safety measures the company is putting into place to keep kids safe, and whether or not it's a smart idea to give kids money when they're on. Because I know my friends, they're kids, they're asking for money for Roblox, and I want to speak with Dave about whether they should give the kids that money.

1:27So mostly excited to speak about the AI stuff. We're going to go into depth about creating games with AI in the first half. And it's my pleasure to welcome Dave to the show. Dave, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. And these are fun topics. So thanks for having me. Definitely. I am a user of Roblox. I can't say I'm an active user, but I do know that when I'm around my younger cousins or my friends, kids, I fire the app up and they show me how to play the games. and it's usually a pretty good time. Well, hey, welcome fellow Roblox user. I've been a Roblox user for 18 years going on 20.

2:06Okay, great. And so the question is, what are games going to look like in the future? Because to this point, you have a platform where people can build games and then you could go out and play the games yourself. And a lot of that is pretty painstaking, taking certain features and moving them in certain directions to enable certain actions, and you could spend a lot of time building games. Building games takes a lot of time. Then this thing called Generative AI happens, and all of a sudden, the idea to build becomes different, where maybe some people say you could just prompt a game and it will show up.

2:45Now, I don't think Roblox is there yet, but I do know that it's on the roadmap. So talk a little bit about how you envision generative AI coming into your creation process and where things stand today. You know, it's pretty interesting if we go back 20 or 30 years and so many of the things maybe we would imagine 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and we'd read them in sci-fi books. Some of them have started to come true. The, you know, the Dick Tracy watch has started to come true and what we think of as the web has started to come true. And when we started the company 20 years ago, we had the notion of this 3D digital platform in the cloud.

3:27And if we gave people this 3D platform, we would see interesting stuff. To zero in on your question, I think the fun answer is we don't even know. And I feel that the reason we don't even know is there's a nuanced angle to AI, which accelerates all of us as humans, whether we're an artist or a 3D designer or just someone with an idea, we accelerate that. It helps us be a better creator, arguably just like Photoshop helped people who used to paint with oil be better creators. So we're going to see a lot of human accelerator. But there's a second nuance, which is what is a game? And as we start to have, in addition to AI creation, within the games themselves and within experiences, the ability for all of us to access AI at any point and any time, it creates almost a new opportunity where we don't know what a game is.

4:31And where I'm going with this is in addition to AI creation, pretty soon we're going to have 3D generation and text generation available within any Roblox game. And so what that means is, for example, a fashion experience like Dress to Impress, where we typically put things on and shop and put an outfit together, will be someday complemented with you or I describing what kind of outfit we would like to create. And so it's interesting to imagine that AI may accelerate creation, not just for game creators, but for every player of games. Right. So if you want to customize your experience, maybe you can prompt your way into a character that looks exactly like you want it to look like.

5:19And people who watch Project Runway and say, I have those ideas in my head. I just don't know how to sew them. I don't know how to cut the fabric. When they start describing those ideas with text or voice prompt, they may start to see those ideas come to fruition. that's just a really small vertical slice of why we think there's an emergent new world of what is a game as AI starts to power some of these experiences. How far is Roblox from a place where you could say, you know, imagine a world where, you know, the characters are dragons, and I'm trying to do this, and these are the objectives, and it should be elegant, but, you know, easy for users to play, and then it just creates the game, you know, in and of itself.

6:09We're getting closer at remarkably high speed. And one of the accelerants of this, and this is true for any AI system, is the more data that's available for training in a legal, copyright, TOS-compliant way, the more quickly we can build up AI power. And Roblox is unique in that we have an enormous amount of 3D data, 3D objects, 3D scenes. there's hundreds and hundreds of medieval castles there's thousands of cars there's thousands of dragons and all of this we're using that data to create not an llm but a 3d foundational model within our ai team and we're we've said publicly we're going to release the first version of it this quarter and we're going to release it in several forms we're going to release it as a open source 3D foundational model for some people, you know, for others to use.

7:11We're going to release it in Roblox Studio. So you will be able to say, make me a good dragon. But we're also going to release it for creators to use within their games. So we will be testing the very first version of you and I in a Roblox experience saying you make your dragon and I make my lion. and we start to see them emerge. Obviously, it's version one, but this is going to happen this quarter. What about building, I guess, these are elements of a game. Do you envision actually being able to prompt and play a game? I think this is really insightful because elements ultimately add up to the full experience.

7:59And the full experience of a game, especially on Roblox, is really quite rich. We have 3D objects. Unbeknownst to a lot of people, the 3D objects on Roblox actually tend to be physically pretty realistic. We run physics simulation. Cars have wheels. If wheels fall off cars, the cars skid out. We have 3D terrain. We have a lot of code embedded in all of those objects. Roblox game creators embed code at the world level and the object level. And you're exactly right. The North Star is not just object creation, but full on experience creation to where one could imagine someone drawing a few sketches of characters, describing a few fun type of gameplay and literally generating their own Roblox experience from that.

8:53can I tell you a crazy thing that I did I was I mean crazy who knows you be the judge I was on Claude earlier today I guess I was thinking about this interview and I said can you create me like a a game where a journalist hunts for scoops and they have to ask the characters for a scoop three times and then at the third time they will give you a scoop and you get a point for each scoop and it actually builds the game it codes up the game and it starts out as like it's just like a text game so like you click on the character and then you you know ask three times and then eventually like you might get the um you might get the experience built out then i prompted it again and i said actually i want this to be a town square that you walk around where characters walk around so it creates it and it has like depersonalized emojis like the lawyer is like a law icon i said no i actually want these to look look like people and then it goes ahead and recodes it and now it then it works literally took me 10 minutes i coded it up and even gave it a name it was called scoop hunter which i didn't even prompt it with next thing i know i'm going out and playing it now i know that's much more basic than um than a roblox game but like it does make you see the path to be able to get there so i'm curious what you think about that and how far away you think we might be from being able to do that within roblox I don't think we're too far away and I think what you're doing it's fun to imagine the prompts you gave cloud to trying those same prompts in a fully immersive 3d environment ultimately over time and I feel where you're going with that is exactly right I like the notion of your game scoop hunter I like the idea of the um the the full physical fabric of that system is a high-resolution 3D environment, a 3D environment that can run on any device, a 3D environment that can be multiplayer around the world.

10:56And that fabric then can support that query. We're going to need some NPCs powered by AI. We might need different personalities that think about their scoops. We might need a great town square that you would stylize more as you discussed it, and that'll all come to life. So I think we're not that far away from that. And so not that next year? I won't say when, but I will say we're going to ship in Q1, both text generation, as well as 3D object generation in Roblox experiences. And we would philosophically agree with you that full experience generation is the highest way to think about that. A full experience that's immersive is 3D objects, it's prompts, it's code, it's pulling all of that together.

11:53I think where this ultimately leads to as computers get faster and have more and more performance is almost where you're going with that is happening in real time as you're walking around a 3D environment. And the ultimate, when we think about how you and I might dream, when we're in a dream, we're literally generating a 3D environment in real time that's changing very quickly as we move around that dream. And so in a way, what you're describing about, if it's done in real time and you're walking around Scoop Hunter and you say, whoa, morph into this. I want Sci-Fi Scoop Hunter with, you know, the Supreme Council of 10 ,000 Scoopers, and it morphs into that.

12:41You can imagine all of that happening in real time. So you're saying you want the players also to be able to prompt as they're there to change the game experience? I think the more we think of a game experience as available to the player, not just the traditional game creator, the more robust the technology is. And we, you know, at Roblox, Roblox Studio is a very powerful tool. All of the facilities in Roblox Studio, we want available to the game creator, AI creation, interactive modeling, 3D things. So there's really kind of a blurring between the studio tool and the creator. And what you're talking about but could be done by the user in real time.

13:26So just to confirm, this is your North Star. You're interested in, well, let's just say goal. This is your goal. You're interested in creating a experience where I could prompt an experience out of thin air like I did with Scoop Hunter. And then as I'm playing a game or I'm in an experience, I, as the user, can prompt my way through it to make it sort of shape to the way that I want to experience the experience. Yeah, and I would say it's bigger than a goal. I think there's a class of technology problems that don't involve things like faster than light travel or hacking human biology that we can imagine with more compute and better algorithms are naturally going to emerge.

14:13This is one of those that I believe is just naturally going to emerge. it gives us the opportunity not just to set that as an interesting goal for those who want that type of environment, but also something that will naturally emerge. I'm not sure everyone 24-7 will be running around Roblox dynamically creating environments all the time, because many of us will be hanging out with our friends, going to a concert. Many of us will like to go to the creations of other people. Many of us will still like to play hide and go seek. But for those who want to use that type of experience or creation, I do think it'll become available.

14:55Yeah, because that is the thing about this, right? When you play a game, the thing about it that makes it so enjoyable is the taste and the talent of the game creator. That's correct. Like, we like to play Assassin's Creed in this house. And part of the joy of Assassin's Creed is just the brilliance of the Ubisoft creators who have gone out and built that game. You could, you experience it in the quests, you experience it everywhere. Now, when it comes to prompting a game, it's almost like you could have a quote unquote normie try to prompt a game, but I'm not, I'm not as as bullish that they'll be able to do what the greats can do and replicate what makes playing a game so magical.

15:43It reminds me a little of when I was younger, I got a Mac Plus and the Mac just came out. And the Mac had WYSIWYG windows and fonts. and all of a sudden everyone thought they could do text layout and typography. And we saw all these documents with 39 different fonts that look like crap. And I think there's a little bit of an analogy to that where font craftsmanship and layout used to be done with movable type. It moved online to Photoshop and other tools. but still there's crafts people who are really good at layout and I think the same is true as we move from oil painting to digital tools and photography I think the same will stay for that Assassin's Creed game you mentioned like there will be a lot of taste and a lot of art even with AI acceleration.

16:45Do you think that AI can replicate that human taste and brilliance that it takes to create a great game. Like I was speaking with Demis. I want to let me put the context here. I was speaking with Demis Asabas who had his AI game player go and beat Go. AlphaGo beat Lisa Dahl, the grand master there. And I was talking to him about like, where do you want AI to go? And he says, I want to be able to not just play Go, but to prompt Go. And Go is obviously a game that has stood the test of time over the years. And what Demis was saying is like, I am trying to build AI that can actually go ahead and build a game as brilliant and as elegant as those that designed Go eons ago.

17:28So let me put that to you. I want to ask you, do you think AI can do this? I think there's about five really interesting threads right now. I think we're still in the early forms of AI where arguably AI is super good at word manipulation and it's learning shape rotation and shape manipulation and more spatial type things and engineering things. So I think we're early there. 10 ,000 years from today, will AI be able to generate games and experiences that are maybe indistinguishable from humans? I could see that. What's interesting, though, is thinking through what does that really mean for us culturally in a society between here and that next 10 ,000 years?

18:25Because there is a notion that we, there's an optimistic notion that we still like things built by humans in a way as well. And we sometimes like to buy that designer thing rather than that, you know, mechanical thing. So I don't know how we go from here over the next 10 ,000 years. I do think ultimately AI is going to get pretty smart. Yeah, I would be, at this point, I would say I'd be surprised if the AI can prompt a brilliant game like an Assassin's Creed. In the long term, I imagine it will. So let me ask you a question about how you're doing this. You're building a 3D foundational model.

19:11Everything we hear about building foundational models is it's exceptionally expensive, takes the best AI talent to really do it well, and it's only available to a few companies. Now, Roblox is not a small company. The day we're speaking, the market cap is north of$37 billion. dollars. But I want to know how you're able to do it with the resources that you have. Whether you're, yeah, basically whether you're able to build what you want to build and how tough this has been. It's super tough. I was in a meeting yesterday. I join our AI group very often to check in on, I would say, not just our 3D foundational model, but our text gen and ultimately our experience generational model.

19:57And we should also talk about ultimately NPC models as well, because that's the kind of the sci-fi complement to 3D experience generation is avatar generation as well. We have a really large AI team and the beauty of it's pretty big. It's like, because if you look at our history, we've made some acquisitions with Loom AI and some brilliant talent there. We've been constantly hiring and we've been building models for four years now, primarily for text and voice safety, for asset moderation. And we've gotten really good at building and running AI at Roblox. Behind the scenes, there's over 200 different models running on our system that are doing so many things at higher quality and higher performance.

20:51We have also gotten very good at running relatively complex models efficiently. And DeepSeek's in the news, that kind of rings the bell for us because our voice model runs very efficiently. We're able to use it to help moderate all the voice on our platform And we've even open sourced one of our voice models so other people can use this model for safety and civility. So bridging that into 3D generation, where I have a lot of experience with that, we also have an amazing amount of data. And a very big data set that I mentioned is usable for training object, 3D object generation and started to put that together.

21:45So we're training, we have enough hardware, we have a great team, and we're going to run this efficiently so that any creator can use it in their game. So we think we're uniquely poised to generate this 3D foundational model and expand on that. And it's all proprietary? All proprietary. Okay. And you're training on actual gameplay to be able to create more gameplay or not yet? So this is very perceptive because we have both static information, which would be 3D objects and shapes. We have something more than static information, which is the code embedded in those objects. So cars on Roblox, we call them 4D cars, not 3D, because they have code.

22:40Like, when do you open the door? How does the user interface work on that? What are the properties of the wheels and the motors on that car? So we have that data to train on as well. How does a car actually function as opposed to how does it look good? The future, though, once again, in a privacy compliant and IP compliant way, is we also will know more and more how people interact with objects. What's a typical way for you or I to walk through a building? How do people interact in a sword fight when they're pretending they're knights? How do people climb on cars? So that time-based information complements the static information and starts to beckon more interactive type experiences.

23:32And I would say when I say proprietary, proprietary plus, of course, the huge open source ecosystem that's out there for tools, open source complementary things, but all of the 3D stuff very heavily proprietary. Okay, so what I'm hearing is you're training on the objects, some of the interactions, but not actual gameplay to be used to generate more gameplay, not yet. I would say not yet. And I would say training on gameplay isn't necessarily something we would use to create gameplay. But training on gameplay may allow when you or I pick your favorite historical figure, whether it's, you know, George Washington or, you know, the founder of any country.

24:20that data may allow us to make more natural avatar simulations as well. It may allow your scoopers to act more natural, you know, like if we know how those various character archetypes work when they've got a scoop and they want to share it with you. So I think we'll see that ultimately drive avatar simulation as well. Okay. And now, David, I want to ask you, you're probably better positioned than most to answer this question, which is, we've been asking, when can you prompt a blueprint, for instance? When can you prompt a design of a piece of furniture? The systems hallucinate too much right now to actually be able to do that in a useful way, at least those that I've seen, maybe someone's built one.

25:15Having built this or work being someone that's working on one of these foundational models for 3d, you're somebody that understands the spatial dynamics of something, how things interact with each other in the real world. Do you think that this type of technology can then be applied to be able to successfully be able to prompt a blueprint, prompt furniture design, prompt some sort of town layout, whatever permutation of this you might imagine. This is really interesting because there's probably hundreds of thousands of town layouts on Roblox. And there are probably, as we start to use the data of human motion through those town layouts, there's, I'm sure, a lot of embedded information.

26:08What layouts work? What layouts promote better social cohesion? What town layouts aren't very good? And the combination of those existing town layouts plus how people interact with them does beckon a future of really the interesting thought of getting useful type of layouts from what's traditionally thought of as a game engine that could actually be used for real life purposes. I'll give you one example I just saw a few days ago. We asked our 3D foundational model to generate an over-the-road 18-wheel semi-trailer, and we started constraining it a bit. we started saying, make it fit in this size.

26:57And these models are getting smart enough that in a smaller size, we'll generate the cab of the trailer without the trailer. And in a larger box, we'll say, oh, now you have enough space to generate the trailer. So I like the idea of a creator on Roblox who's thinking of it as a game using our AI to build a fun game called build my own house, have some AI help power it, and have it be a mix of human intuition and AI to make the house really functional. And over in AutoCAD land or Replit land are these beautiful 3D architectural programs. Imagining those being driven by AI physics and aesthetics, I think we're all going to be designing our own homes.

27:49Absolutely. Okay. We've got some questions from our Discord, a lot of them about responsibility. Starting with the AI responsibility question, we have a member that says, AI likely will soon be building its own worlds inside Roblox. Who actually takes responsibility if something goes wrong? Is it going to be the user? Is it going to be Roblox? Who's responsible if AI builds something bad? Well, I think what we're going to see, wonderful question. And we are put in a position where we have an amazing amount of responsibility here. We have a wide range of ages. We're running in different countries with different regulations and policies.

28:36And where I see this going is we need to be able to handle whatever comes out of AI. And what that means is if one of our creators makes a really interesting 3D experience and they're running in a fairly untethered mode, we'll give them the guidelines on the type of experience, the age range. But it's our job to be watching that still. And I think it's our job to be using AI to analyze the output of what their AI built to see, is it policy compliant? And so we take that responsibility. We take the responsibility of making sure you can predict and trust the policy adherence of what is on our platform.

29:30Okay, so it will be Roblox's responsibility, not the creator of the props. It is still the creator's responsibility. Like we have terms of service, do not build this. We do not tolerate this. We have zero tolerance for a wide range of things, including bullying, hate, you name it. But if someone breaks that policy, we're going to catch it and we're going to handle it. And so it's really both. Okay, so no new precedent on digital liability if someone uses your prompting tool. No, I don't think so. What if the prompting tool hallucinates some weird shit? Humans can already hallucinate weird shit.

30:13Yeah, but anyway, when you use a prompting tool, you give up some control. But I hear what you're saying. We can and we do. All right, let's take a break. And we're going to come back and we're going to talk a little bit more about child safety, covering the Hindenburg Research Report. and then I want to talk about the metaverse and I want to talk about financial responsibility within Roblox, which is something you and I spoke about offline and I definitely want to get to. All right, we'll be back right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles.

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31:45You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Buehler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

32:13And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Roblox CEO Dave Bazzucchi. Dave, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us. I've been telling you, I told you right beforehand that I've been following Roblox for a very long time. I've got younger cousins, friends, kids that use it and gotten a chance to see the platform. And it's a fascinating place and they do love it. So let's ask a couple of these safety questions. Just my job, I have to ask you them. so don't get too mad at me but I got to run through some of these accusations. We actually like talking about this and we feel it's a wonderful area for the future to really lean in on so we don't if anything we welcome the discussion.