How AI Will Transform Roblox Games into Photorealistic Worlds | CEO David Baszucki

What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI throughout their lifetime?

Dave Baszucki

I think zero right now. I don't think we're close to crossing the human-AI barrier. But it is worth thinking about how things are changing every day. We have to incorporate that and do that.

There are also some weird universal truths of things that stick around for 40 years, and you kind of have to blend them together. We feel that 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 Bazooki, [music] 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.

Sarah Guo

Dave, thanks so much for doing this with us.

Dave Baszucki

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

Well, exciting to be here.

Dave Baszucki

Yeah, great to have you guys. Thanks.

Sarah Guo

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

Dave Baszucki

Yeah, two-step on this one. I would say, first, I know you both dabble in investing a little.

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 presents 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. You can see social-networking companies, you can see YouTube video, you can see toys, and you can see all of that.

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.

Feels like Ready Player One, the movie.

Dave Baszucki

Exactly. We do have that business-plan slide. What we had always imagined is that 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, and 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 out of them.

That was literally the genesis of Roblox, and here we are 20 years later. There's so much more to do. One vision of AI is: How do you superpower the creation of that holodeck? 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?

In that sense, AI is super interesting. It's about trying to get a vision that's been around for 20 years and has arguably been in science fiction—once again, Snow Crash, holodeck forever.

There is another interesting vision, and I think it's useful comparing these product categories. What's the future of just a single person by themselves dreaming what they want to dream? We sometimes call that the real-time-dreaming category.

It's a category that we can see a bit of the trappings of with short-form video. There's a little bit of that in short-form video. Someone's in bed at 2:00 a.m. doomscrolling. It's reacting to dwell time. It's reacting to what you favorite. You're getting a little bit of a pre-built dream that 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?

Dave Baszucki

That is exactly right. If you put those at two extremes, one is a communication platform with high fidelity and 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. We may see weird product categories we've never imagined.

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 an “I want to learn French” video, you're in a French café, starting to talk to an NPC.

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.

Sarah Guo

Do you think that same space will exist for both consumer and business applications? 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 them? To what degree does your life become virtual?

Dave Baszucki

Yeah, we've seen, on the communication side, that 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 COVID-initiated video.

Dave Baszucki

We also did have the COVID-initiated 3D experience on Roblox, actually. We found that side-by-side video was something a lot of young people used Roblox as an early test case for: 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. If we were having this 4D immersive communication, we'd say, “Go to legacy analog mode and make it look like Zoom,” basically. 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. I want to show you something. Come and follow me,” kind of thing. I do think 4D simulation, as it gets photorealistic, will be a superset of video.

The other thing for business is that there are 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. One of them is acoustics. There are some really tricky physics problems when you're having a company meeting of 1,000 people.

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

There's one final technical thing that's going to be very, very difficult: when people try to sing “Happy Birthday” to you together. No matter whether you're on Zoom or in a 3D simulation, you're hearing them about 30 milliseconds later. What I think we're going to find is that we're actually allowing each one of us to sing “Happy Birthday” with a time-forward extrapolation of each other and then remixing it.

For the business side, I do think ultimately we're going to see some interesting conferencing solutions.

Sarah Guo

Roblox has this amazing, wild story with physics simulation, or a physics engine, as part of the birth of Roblox. But today, or for the last decade, I have thought of this as an immersive world where people have their first coding experiences, build amazing games, and interact with each other. I don't think of that world as being super focused on realism.

Dave Baszucki

That's right.

Sarah Guo

Is that something that's changing for you guys? Is it enabled now? How should we think about that?

Dave Baszucki

The way I would think about it is that 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 would say we just started talking about full acoustic simulation. I just tweeted about it. Approximate attenuation and all of these kinds of things, including echoes, are going to start happening in the physics simulator. Behind the scenes, it has gotten better and better and better. It'll keep getting better.

But what we have found is that the diversity of developers is beyond our expectations. I would say some of the things that have gone viral—Dress to Impress, for example, and Grow a Garden—are less physical. But they have leveraged cloud capabilities that we've built side by side.

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.

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

Sarah Guo

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?

Dave Baszucki

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 5 to 10 years, is: What's the most efficient way to synchronize the state of 10,000 people?

Sarah Guo

It's a deep infrastructure problem versus necessarily a physics problem.

Dave Baszucki

How do we synchronize the state and the memory over the last 5 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 literally in video latent space—a minute of frames. It's showing super-early promise.

Dave Baszucki

I think the technical revolution is going to be: What's the ultimate synchronized state for 10,000 people? Is it in video latent space? Is it in a much more native 3D format? Is it a hybrid, a new discovery of some 3D video latent space? To be determined.

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 as vectors, 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—

Sarah Guo

What do you think that does for you—the history of your world?

Dave Baszucki

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 that everything could be played back, but you could look at any playback.

Sarah Guo

And so everything's completely transparent. There's no private conversations. It actually delves into that.

Dave Baszucki

I think for us, we would then use it very thoughtfully, privacy-compliantly, and judiciously. But for very simple things, you can imagine there was a safety incident. Let's go back and put 5 cameras, listen to the audio, and see what happened.

Sarah Guo

And make a good judgment call. That's kind of interesting.

Dave Baszucki

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, make a cool video of the best moment.

I think where it ultimately ends up for us is there's a huge push now for people to find kind of hybrid video-WASD 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.

Sarah Guo

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

Dave Baszucki

Yeah, go check out our X feed. I think in 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 1: everyone has access to an NPC that can get pretty good at playing any Roblox game.

Sarah Guo

Super cool.

Dave Baszucki

Challenge level 2 is: by watching—if I 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.

Dave Baszucki

Would we allow you to have your own virtual doppelganger if you wanted?

Sarah Guo

That's fascinating.

Dave Baszucki

And then number 3 would be: 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? 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; I'm 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 2D, in the workspace, and in the productivity area, I think it's going to be interesting to imagine—

Sarah Guo

So, you're basically using these 13 billion hours a month to train—

13 billion.

Sarah Guo

13 billion—

And that will be a Roblox privacy-compliant model. We'll 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: upload Benjamin Franklin's history—it's already embedded in an LLM—and just say, “Hey, I want Ben Franklin.”

Sarah Guo

And I want a happy Ben Franklin. Are there experiences that you imagine creators making with these NPCs that are really different from—

I think there are a lot of standard game NPCs that 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 NPC behavior, imagining someday—

Sarah Guo

Many people can create them.

Dave Baszucki

I think to make that happen, these platforms have to be very cloud-connected platforms rather than running locally, 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.

Sarah Guo

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 heuristics and sub-behaviors in sort of fine detail to capture edge cases, to just doing end-to-end models for deep learning. It sounds like you're basically considering doing the same thing for NPCs.

Dave Baszucki

That's the exciting computer science capability. 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.

Sarah Guo

Yeah. Super interesting. What do you think the role of a Roblox game designer, or any game designer, is 5 years out from now? Do you think it's different?

Dave Baszucki

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'm not to the point where I believe what we call AI slop today is going to take over. I think the human touch has a long runway on it. So you could imagine more diversity or quality of experiences supplemented by AI. I do think the role will be more leveraged, and the quality coming out of 5 people will be astounding.

Sarah Guo

But we'll come to expect that quality.

Dave Baszucki

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, will be able to go away for 24 hours and your agents are going to be 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.

Sarah Guo

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

Dave Baszucki

I think it's a super-exciting, interesting thing to think about. Yeah, I think, like I said before, one thing is going to be: As the fidelity gets higher, is memory stored in video latent space, or does there need to be another research breakthrough where memory is ultimately stored in some new latent space that's 3D or 4-dimensional? But the fidelity is amazing. I think that's really beautiful.

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, 1,000-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,” like, people are putting together a bunch of pieces: dedicated NPC capability, dedicated synchronization capability, 3D upsampling, 2D upsampling, and potentially world model stuff. You can imagine that being used even in its early state today, rather than as a gameplay state. 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. That video actually goes to a multiplayer experience. You could imagine that.

I think what a lot of other people are wondering is: does someone hit short-form video the way they did with short-form video, into a highly retentive, 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 would say, though, we are doubling down on a hybrid, multi-AI tech stack that supports multiplayer natively.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, I think one of the ideas that's internationally very interesting has been the idea that you could generate serial microdramas 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. It's really interesting. Some entrepreneurs tried to do that—I won't mention who—5 or 10 years ago, and then they naturally emerged, kind of thing. It's interesting to think about whether those microdramas are easier to produce. They don't need live actors, but what is the plotline that really resonates? We'll see with that.

Sarah Guo

And you can mass-test that at scale if you're using AI, right? You can actually do a very large number of iterations. This is kind of one of the arguments people make around the Fermi paradox about why we haven't seen alien life: there's alien life, and they're just stuck in these virtual worlds now where it's more fun than the real world.

David Baszucki

What's the famous quote—"Where is everyone?"

Sarah Guo

Yeah, exactly.

David Baszucki

So one option is they're in some virtual landscape that's more compelling than the real world, and therefore there's no reason to travel the universe.

Sarah Guo

Or it could be that we could really start conjecturing about the future evolution: is it human life or machine life, and all of that?

David Baszucki

And once it gets to maybe human-machine life, what happens? The subsumption.

Sarah Guo

Yeah. That's interesting.

David Baszucki

Yeah. That's the Vanilla Sky thing.

Sarah Guo

Exactly.

David Baszucki

The optimistic thing is more the holodeck thing, where everyone's hanging out with other people rather than a simulation of themselves.

Sarah Guo

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

There are some fun things, like a Black Mirror dating episode. I don't know if you've seen it.

Dave Baszucki

Where they have a lot of virtual doppelgänger power. Obviously, I'm not saying Roblox is doing dating. We're just talking about this right now—18-plus, ID-verified, all of that. So let's not go crazy, but let's think about a future like the one in the Black Mirror episode, where you literally can spawn the lives of 1,000 virtual doppelgängers.

Those 1,000 virtual doppelgängers go on your new dating app in 3 minutes. Someone else's virtual doppelgängers live 1,000 virtual lives with your virtual doppelgänger. Then they say, "What's the success rate?" When the 1,000 virtual doppelgängers 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 social simulation.

David Baszucki

There are a lot of things I think are going to be really hard to project. I think one of the things we would focus on is building raw, high-performance infrastructure, having AI as a service, having all of these things capable in a cloud, having the same thing run on a phone as on a computer, and having it auto-translate. Hopefully, we would discover some of these things.

Sarah Guo

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 and, as you said, cloud persistence. I think it's just going to make the characters much more interesting very quickly.

David Baszucki

Thinking through how we would embody memory for NPCs, which is more than just a prompt, one could imagine any NPC on Roblox—because we have a recording of the whole thing—actually having access to everything they've ever said or done in a very lean format. They can go back through that and retrain on it. Hopefully, that would be a native part of the platform.

But I do know there's a lot of interesting engagement with these types of companions, and imagining fully 3D versions will be pretty fascinating.

Sarah Guo

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 1 serious relationship with an AI throughout their lifetime?"

David Baszucki

I think zero right now.

Sarah Guo

I do. I don't think we're close to crossing the human-AI barrier, but it is worth thinking about. He meant it even in the context of something superficial, where there isn't true intelligence behind it, just given the behavior with text. Once you start having video and virtual worlds, I can imagine a real-time coach or therapist in your earbud, just hanging out all the time.

David Baszucki

Yeah. So I think for that kind of less invasive, more over-your-shoulder coaching, that already seems like a major use case for some of the ChatGPT and other platforms. Mental-health advice, coaching, and other things like that are actually some of the major use cases.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, I think that will be arguably very valuable.

Can I ask an industry-perspective question, just given that you've worked in gaming for a very long time now? There's a lot of discussion about how assets of different types are cheaper to create with generative tools. I 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.

David Baszucki

One could say that, no matter how cheap it is to create assets, the expectation of quality from consumers goes up at exactly the same velocity.

Sarah Guo

Okay?

David Baszucki

And so what was not possible a while ago becomes something consumers expect.

I think there's a general notion that the technology for the gaming industry has to move to the cloud and be vertically integrated, and asset management can't just ship on a DVD or be a giant download. I think we're really seeing that. We've launched dynamic level of detail, or LOD, for textures; meshes are on the way. So you could imagine every single asset in the game—sound, 3D object, or image—existing in various formats. The traditional format is a texture, a mesh, or an audio file.

Sarah Guo

Mhm.

David Baszucki

The future format could be an AI prompt, generated procedurally on demand. There are these 2 things, and they're both very AI-enabled. One can then imagine that you have to be cloud-connected, because for all of these assets you need a full range of LOD. Just like with video streaming and upsampling on low-end devices, you need low LOD; on high-end devices, you need 4K LOD; and ultimately, you need on-demand AI generation.

That gets into, once again, one of the demos, which is probably 3D upsampling. The notion is that if someone makes a very primitive experience on Roblox, they could augment it with a prompt and just say, "I know it's kind of primitive, but make it look medieval and more realistic," and have all of those assets automatically upsampled in 3D in the cloud, for free, on demand. That kind of just-in-time capability is some of the stuff we're thinking about in terms of how AI can accelerate development if you have a cloud platform.

Roblox is also, from the studio perspective, one of the biggest development environments in the world.

Sarah Guo

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

David Baszucki

There are industry-standard ways of using a different model with Studio. If you're in Claude Code, you can control Studio, which is super exciting. A lot of our users have started gluing these things together, with the hope that ultimately they can build from there.

Roblox Studio itself is running a native assistant as well as a native code engine. I think the pattern for that is that Roblox Studio will increasingly follow many of those industry best practices for code. In parallel, it needs to have an environmental-generation component that's very unique to it.

I think the future of environmental generation is, once again, that any prompt you can imagine—text, image, video, possibly walking around in a world model—can define a world. You can iterate on that to a primitive 3D skeleton: "Do I like it?" Then you can iterate on that to a fully functional game.

That's our vision: to run those side by side, so the first-time Studio user gets it out of the box, while at the same time we plug into all of your AI workflows. I think the final thing is that, because it's so cloud-connected, you have all of that cloud capability we talked about earlier: spinning up jobs, spinning up agents, running test plans, and just grinding away, trying something different.

Sarah Guo

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

David Baszucki

What we have seen is bigger teams over the years. The top Roblox creators now are well into the tens of millions, with some making $30 million-plus a year. It's really serious stuff.

We have seen in the Roblox creator community, I think, a healthy sign: the average yearly revenue of creator number 100 is going up faster than that of creator number 1. So that's a bit of a healthy long tail.

And I would say all the way out to creator 1,000, there's such a huge community of people making a living. What I think our creators have found is it's gotten both healthier and more competitive.

I think we've seen the pattern now of much more live ops because this is the cloud. You can update your experience just like good websites, every day or every week. That is just kind of a constant practice. So I'd say update frequency is much more rapid.

Sarah Guo

Which is great for users because they get updated content at a faster rate.

David Baszucki

That's right. Users love updates. They love new things. It keeps games fresh.

I think the other thing we've seen is, on the discovery side, we've increasingly taken the approach that we want discovery to be completely transparent. These are all the things that are going into the discovery algorithm. We check it.

There's a benefit to that transparency in discovery in that it actually keeps a lot of pressure on us. You know, “Oh my gosh, someone's going to game discovery.”

Sarah Guo

Well, then we better make it really good, right? And transparent. I actually think transparent discovery and recommendations is an interesting trend for the industry worth talking about.

David Baszucki

With that, we've also seen content distribution get richer and a little bit less spiky. The top 20 experiences on Roblox are now all really good and all kind of vying for the number one slot, which maybe wasn't so true 3 or 4 years ago.

Sarah Guo

Zooming all the way out for a second. I think it was true 5 or 10 years ago when we met. It was true when I was talking to one of the members of your leadership team today. They would say you're an extremely high-conviction, very long-term-oriented leader, right? So, you know, a 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 square these things where you have a very long-term view when so much is happening in the environment?

David Baszucki

I think we always want to pair “take the long view,” which is one of our 4 big values, with “get stuff done.” It's almost like in those old Gartner charts: take the long view, not take the long view; get stuff done, not get stuff done. The Magic Quadrant is take the long view, get stuff done.

We typically mean rapid iteration inside the company. 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 scary thing unless it can be broken down: we're going to ship this thing every week and iterate toward this, but we have a good target of where we're going.

Inside the company, I'd say our AI team, our facial age estimation team, and our safety team are literally working on things 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.

Sarah Guo

But you make it sound pretty simple in that all the things that you're trying to get done on a weekly or 6-month time scale are aligned toward a vision that—

David Baszucki

If you have your 6- to 12-month vision—

Sarah Guo

Yeah—

David Baszucki

Hopefully that's moving not too fast. But at the same time, the weekly iterations are moving very quickly in that direction, and you know that you could say the Roblox vision is ultimately to build the holodeck. It's 10,000 people. It's multiplayer, real-time modification of the environment. It's NPCs—

Sarah Guo

Photorealistic.

David Baszucki

That's a pretty stable spec for 20 years. And so then—

Sarah Guo

I actually feel like that's the biggest takeaway for me here. I spent a lot of time with software CEOs, right? I think there's a lot of actual concern about whether the vision we had for the company, in terms of its durability or its value, is still as valuable as we thought 5 years ago.

For Roblox, perhaps because you were pointing at something so far away to begin with, it's pretty clear. I think AI only moves you—

David Baszucki

We have crisped that up over the years. I would say 2 years ago we were a little less crisp. We would say we're going for 1 billion DAUs. That's a good spec.

With this spec I just mentioned, it's a little harder to operationalize around product management teams and that. So we took a stepping stone and said we want to get to 10% of global gaming content on the way to that.

It's actually a remarkably good step. It's about 300 million DAUs. It's about 20 billion. It's about 3x where we are. It can be forensically torn apart. We can see what part is the U.S. market. We actually have a higher target for us than 10%.

And so that has been very clarifying. I think for a software CEO, always knowing both 3x and 10x is very helpful, because if you don't know 10x, then it's hard to sleep at night. If you don't know 3x, it's hard to plan forensically how we're going to operationalize that and how quickly we're going to get there.

Sarah Guo

One other thing that I think Roblox has done uniquely well is how you've thought about hiring and how you've rethought certain aspects of that. Yeah. I think that's really led to people having more bias to action, moving quickly, and iterating rapidly.

Can you talk a little about how you've rethought some aspects of that, if you're willing to share?

David Baszucki

Yeah. One is we've been very public that we really want values-aligned people who are good problem solvers and very creative, and it's hard to do signal-to-noise in that kind of a hiring process.

So what we actually bought was a company about 5 years ago that was doing its best scientifically to build 3D assessment tooling for some big companies, to really find people who are problem solvers and creative.

Sarah Guo

That's part of what I was referring to. That was fascinating that you did that acquisition.

David Baszucki

So we bought Imbellus. We got a great team of scientists, people who had been involved with the SAT test and all of that, and we've tuned that to our new college grad and intern program.

So far, we've essentially, I believe in a very fair meritocracy kind of way, taken the—whatever it is—10, 50, 60,000 people and run them all through what we've shown, I think, to be a very fair assessment, not weighted by any other social factor.

The people who come out of there give us incredible confidence that they're problem solvers. They do a bunch of other things really well. So we kind of have this building wave inside the company of 3 years ago, 2 years ago, 1 year ago—these 100, 200, 300, 400 people who hopefully were mentoring some of the best future leaders in the industry.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, it's super interesting because I have a number of friends who always talk about how you discover untapped sources of talent, or how you find the best people in the world, and whether there are ways to test for that or screen for that.

David Baszucki

We've done a lot of testing on this—fairness testing, looking backward on it. I'm very confident in where it's going to go for us.

Sarah Guo

Super interesting.

David Baszucki

Yeah, it's a very systems-oriented approach. The one thing we have found, which is a little edgy, might be the correlation between traditional universities and our own testing.

Sarah Guo

Sorry, what's edgy about that?

David Baszucki

Well, I think people typically think, “I went to Stanford. That's where all the top talent is.” We have found that not necessarily to be true, and we have found community college and the small Midwestern engineering school. Because we're assessing in our own way, we basically ignore the signal of where you went to university.

Sarah Guo

I've heard that anecdotally from other CEOs now, particularly for certain cohorts, like the cohort that came during COVID. For a lot of the top universities, it's perceived as a weaker cohort.

I don't know the reason or the interpretation behind it, but it's interesting to see the shift in terms of how people even think about where some of the best talent is. So it's interesting that you're kind of saying, “We get to have self-determination. We get to say, ‘Colleges, you do what you want,’ all of that. We're just going to do it in a fair way that we think is our way,” and it's worked out.

Can you give, just because it's so interesting, any intuition for some way you test for problem-solving capability?

David Baszucki

I think we make public some of the tests that we use, and the cool thing is they're all built on Roblox. They're all tested by lots of people, and they're arguably really interesting 3D problems, like programming a factory or using some new geometric language to program a robot. It's almost like turtle graphics, and you can play with that.

Sarah Guo

We're going to try to get jobs. I would actually be a little afraid to take the test myself, given how good some of our candidates are.

You know, as a long-term predictor of the future, is there something happening in AI that you believe or hold with conviction, like 5 years out, that you think not everybody believes yet?

David Baszucki

I think typically it's the other way. More people believe more stuff than I believe.

Sarah Guo

You think of yourself as a skeptic?

David Baszucki

Well, I think of myself as—

Sarah Guo

He's building the holodeck, but he's a skeptic. I—

David Baszucki

I think I'm more about the power of time and the power of compounding than about an amazing invention and just rapid iteration.

One thing I constantly am amazed by is either the graphical user interface or Microsoft Excel.

I think I was playing with Microsoft Excel in the ’80s, and here we are 40 years later; it’s not that different.

Sarah Guo

Yeah. So useful. So it’s kind of like this interesting complement in the AI world. Things are changing every day. We have to incorporate and do that. And then there are also some weird universal truths of things that stick around for 40 years, and you kind of have to blend them together.

So I think that’s how we—I think the good news is we feel that if we build Roblox right, it might be the kind of thing that’s kicking around in 40 years.

Awesome. Thanks so much Dave.

Thank you for joining us.

David Baszucki

Thank you. Okay, cool. Those were really good questions.

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