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

0:00What 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 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.

0:35Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Alad and I are here with Dave Bazzucchi, the founder and CEO of Roblox, the 3D immersive world where more than 150 million users come every day to hang out. We talk with Dave about the future of AI in gaming, their investments in AI, how NPCs are going to change and really transform games. Roblox is a studio, one of the largest coding platforms out there, and their 20-year mission to build the holodeck. 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. Exciting to be here.

1:14Yeah, great to have you guys. Thanks. So I think we wanted 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? how you think about assets within games, how you think about world creation. So we'd 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.

1:43I would say first, I know you both dabble in investing a little. So there is a 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 co-experience. 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 it imagined is really a new category. Some have called it the metaverse, some have called it the holodeck, which is really the ultimate high fidelity simulation where people can come together and do stuff.

2:28It was like a Ready Player One movie. Exactly. And so we do have that business plan slide. And what we had always imagined is if this high 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 house of it. So 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 holodeck?

3:11And how do you get it photorealistic as soon as possible? How do you get 10 ,000 people in it instead of 100? 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. There is another interesting vision and I think it's useful comparing these product things that's much more, what's the future of just a single person by themselves dreaming what they want to dream? And we sometimes call that real-time dreaming category.

3:53It'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 2am 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 prebuilt dream that I think we sometimes imagine could go all the way to the famous Tom Cruise movie, Vanilla Sky, where he literally real time dreamed for several years in an imaginary universe where everyone around him was primarily an NPC. And he didn't even know he was doing it. So that's more world building as content.

4:35That is exactly right. And so if you put those at two extremes, one is communication platform, high fidelity 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 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.

5:18So 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, instead of doing a Zoom, why don't you go into a shared space with someone and meet with that? I think... What degree of your life becomes virtual? Yeah, we have seen, 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.

5:52We 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 arguably the COVID-initiated video. We also did have the COVID-initiated 3D experience on Roblox, actually. And we found side-by-side 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 we were having this 4D immersive communication, we'd say go to legacy analog mode and make it look like Zoom, basically.

6:40And we could always do that, but we'd be able to do things we could never do on Zoom. You'd say, hey, let's pop up and go walk around my office and I want to show you something, come and follow me kind of thing. So I do think the 4D simulation, as it gets photorealistic, will be a superset of video. the the other thing for business is um there's a few things that 4d and i use 40 because it's not just 3d shape but it's function in a way and will provide that video does not provide is acoustical things and there's some real tricky physics problems when they're 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 who's live, who's not live, how do we mix the sound, which is very tricky.

7:28If we do it in 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. Like I walk closer to you and I hear you. And 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 time forward extrapolation of each other and then remixing it.

8:15So I do, 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 or physics engine as like part of the birth of Roblox. But then today or for the last decade, 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 as being super focused on realism. That's right. So is that something that's changing for you guys? Is it enabled now? Like, how should we think about that? I think what you, the way I would think about it is we're pushing really hard on the physics simulation capability.

8:59And at the same time, we have this incredible free market that we can't control on content generation. 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 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.

9:39But they have leveraged cloud capabilities 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. 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.

10:20How 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? 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 1? We feel it's super robust to build a communication platform. And that's part of our goal of getting to 10 % of gaming. The technology for this, I think we're going to start unraveling it over the next five to 10 years, is what's the most efficient way to synchronize the state of 10 ,000 people?

11:05And when we... That's a deep infrastructure problem versus necessarily a physical simulation. How do we synchronize the state and the memory over the last five hours of 10 ,000 people? Where have they been? Where have they been in 3D space? What have they been doing? The world model thing is very exciting because they're storing memory in literally video latence. 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 a much more native 3D format? Is it a hybrid new discovery of some 3D video latent space to be determined?

11:49I 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 to play back anything that's ever happened on Roblox. That's 13 billion hours a month. And so the ability... What do you think that does for you, the history of your world? So there's a sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clarke called The Light of Other Days, which talks about the fantasy of what would happen if we had infinite playback in our world. It's like a real social problem. because if everything we've ever done can be played back, actually in that sci-fi book, it's not just everything could be played back, but you could look at any playback.

12:43And 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, oh, 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. 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 it, make a cool video of the best moment.

13:32And 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 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 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.

14:15Yeah, go check out on XRX feed. I think the last day or two, we released a bunch of native video demos and maybe we can even play them back here. But 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, would be challenge level one. Everyone has access to an NPC that can get pretty good at playing any Roblox game. So 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.

15:01Would we allow you to have your own virtual doppelganger if you wanted? That's fascinating. And then number three would be is if I have a good virtual doppelganger, just as agentic is all the buzz in other areas, is there a simple user interface for agentic virtual doppelgangers? And that starts to get interesting because one could imagine sending their virtual self out to go do something. It could be, you know, my son or my daughter wants to play with me, having to do some work. Could my virtual doppelganger fit in for 15 minutes? Sure, that's great. That could be really interesting. and there's a lot of other things, just like we're going to see agentic space in the 2D and the workspace and the productivity area.

15:51I think it's going to be interesting to imagine. So you're basically using these 18 million hours a month to train... 13 billion. 13 billion, excuse me, to train... Native NPC model. That will be a Roblox privacy compliant model, 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, upload 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 creators making with these NPCs that are really different from the games they have today?

16:35I think there's a lot of standard game NPCs 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 many people can create them. I think to make that happen, these platforms have to be very cloud-connected platforms rather than running local 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.

17:25So I think we would want to enable both of those. It's really interesting because basically the transition is going to be a poor analog. But there's a transition that happened in self-driving. we went from mapping out heuristics and sub-behaviors and sort of fine detail to capture edge cases to just doing end-to-end models for deep learning. And it sounds like you're basically considering doing the same thing for NPCs. I think that's the exciting computer science capability is rather than all of these wonderful techniques people have used, decision trees and this and this, getting to a purely more general modeling solution would be really fascinating.

18:03in that. So very 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'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.

18:48Like I think the human touch has got a long runway on it.

18:56So experiences supplemented by AI. But I do think the role will be more leveraged and the quality coming out of five people will be astounding, but we'll come to expect that quality. So quality will go up. I think iteration on testing will go up. I think where we see platforms like Roblox going is just as people are starting to spin up agents to develop code, I think people, hopefully on the 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.

19:47There'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 is a set of research around world models, and 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. I think, like I said before, I think one thing is going to be the higher the fidelity, is memory stored in video latents? 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?

20:33But the fidelity is amazing. I think that's really beautiful. And I think that 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 photorealism not being done server-side, but being done in intermediate spaces or client-side 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, people are putting together a bunch of pieces, dedicated NPC capability, dedicated synchronization capability, 3D upsampling, 2D upsampling, and potentially world model stuff.

21:25World model, 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. One could imagine that. I think what a lot of other people are wondering is the short form video. Does someone hit it just like they did with short form video into a highly retentive, like local dreaming product that can just react to what you're doing.

22:04I think it's still early for both of those, but it's a big possibility. I would say that we are doubled down on a hybrid multi-AI tech stack that supports multiplayer natively. Yeah, I think one of the ideas that's like internationally very interesting has been the idea that you can generate 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. Microdramas, I've watched a few. I mean, it's really interesting. You know, 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.

22:43It's interesting to think if those micro dramas are easier to produce, they don't need live actors. But, you know, what is the plot line 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 that's right you know a very large number of iterations this is kind of one of the arguments people make around the for me paradox of like why haven't we seen alien life and the idea is it's just there's alien life they're just stuck in these virtual worlds now where you know it's funner than the real world like what's the famous quote where is everyone yeah exactly so one option is there's some virtual landscape that's more compelling than the real world and therefore there's no reason to travel the universe or it could be you know we could really start conjecturing what's the future evolution is it human or machine life and all of that yeah and once it gets to maybe human machine life what happens so yeah this assumption yeah yeah that's a yeah interesting yeah that's the vanilla sky yeah exactly or the optimistic thing is more the holodeck thing like everyone's hanging out with other people rather than a simulation of themselves.

23:53Yeah. Are there experiences that you imagine from a, like a communication or a social perspective that you think are going to be 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 interspaces. 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 a lot of virtual doppelganger power. And obviously, Roblox is not doing dating. We're just talking about this right now.

24:31You know, blah, blah, blah, 18 plus, ID verified, all of that. So let's not go crazy. But let's think about a future in the Black Mirror episode where you literally can spawn the life of a thousand virtual doppelgangers. That thousand virtual doppelgangers, you're on your new dating app in three minutes. 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.

25:09So there's, um, I think 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 really optimistic about that given the engagement that people see with these companions as just a text interface with 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.

26:19But 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 at dinner parties, 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 think we're close to crossing the human AI barrier, 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.

27:02I can imagine a real-time coach therapist like in your earbud just hanging out all the time. Yeah. So 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 some of the, like JotGPT and other platforms where 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 an industry perspective question, just given you've worked in gaming for a very long time now? Why do you think, like, there's a lot of discussion about how assets of different types are cheaper to create with generative tools?

27:42I don't think that's really changed 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. And so, you know, what was not possible a while ago, the expectation of consumers will go up. I think 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 really seeing we've launched dynamic LOD for textures, meshes is on the way.

28:32So you can imagine every single asset in the game, sound, 3D object, image can exist in various formats. Traditional format is it's like a texture or a mesh or an audio file. 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 have a full range of LOD, just like with video, streaming, upsampling. On low-end devices, you need low LOD. High-end devices, you need 4K LOD. And ultimately, on-demand AI generation. That then gets into, once again, one of the demos is probably on 3D upsampling.