Roblox CEO David Baszucki unveils Build, an in-app AI game creator targeting all 130M+ daily users

platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have David Bizooki from Roblox. He's the founder and CEO. He's been on the show before. Welcome back, David. How are you doing?

Hey, it is great to be here. Thank you.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh I'm very excited about Build. I'm very excited about a lot of other things going on in the Roblox world, but uh take us through the announcement today. Uh it makes so much sense. I think a lot of people could have predicted this happening, but I'm very interested in the shape of the project and, uh how you actually see it, uh changing what Roblox is. Yeah, the shape is ambitious and at the same time it goes all the way back to our root roots. You know, 20 years ago when we launched, we had this mission and vision of removing limits of gaming and having everyone be a creator. The notion of a a UGC platform was new.

It's interesting that 20 years ago, our first slogan was you make the game. And so, you know, time has an interesting way of going full circle. Fast forward to where we are right now. Roblox Studio has a bunch of models working to accelerate creation. We have the studio assistant. People are using it with MCP. And so, we're gathering all of those models and bringing the studio assistant right to a tab in our mobile app both for oneshot game creation and iterative gaming creation. It's really an elegant unification of what has traditionally been Roblox Studio all the way to the the mobile app tab as well.

So, right now, um I've seen tons of models that are capable of designing incredible games when prompted appropriately in a variety of of of systems. But, uh they're all sort of expensive right now. Some of them are subsidized on plans. Um, but I think everyone's optimistic about the cost coming down by orders of magnitude very quickly. But how are you thinking about doing that dance right now of giving creators the most powerful AI and not putting too many limits on it, but setting yourself up for a really solid financial uh footprint over time as the product gets more popular. the the the hope is, you know, our well over 130 million DAUs, more and more of them can be creators. And and I'll highlight that the economics aren't changing. You know, we expect more and more money to flow to our creator ecosystem as even part of this announcement. There's a there's a neat thing underneath um what people see on the userfacing side of Roblox that we're a huge infrastructure company. We have data centers all around the world. We have bandwidth. We have CPU. We have inference and we started this fortunately well over 10 years ago to keep cost down and performance high. A lot of the inference we run today we run all on our own data centers. We optimize that in a way the philosophy and the optimism of cost coming down goes straight to build in that just as Roblox Studio was the way people made games 20 years ago that's still going to be live. But we think uh as games get more complex, as they get multiplayer, as they have interesting economies, as we want a safety infrastructure, all of that running behind it, that promise comes back with people being able to prompt and create games. Our our vision is that everyone will have access to this for a certain amount. We will initially have the ability to buy more token usage if you want. But the the beautiful thing is this is eventually consistent and as inference gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper just as some other things were expensive 20 years ago, we think more and more people are going to be able to use this more and more.

How uh as you reflect on the decision to build your own infrastructure, how bad would it be if you hadn't done that right now? Uh would do do you do you uh would you be feeling like a memory crunch? Would you be are you feeling any of that? Like what about what's going on in public cloud or the AI buildout is well positioning you or or maybe even affecting you?

Yeah, I think we've said publicly before the cost benefits of our infrastructure may be roughly 3x. Now I don't I don't want to quote that on inference and other things but there's an enormous advantage to that and an enormous advantage of taking all that money pushing it to creators um rather than cloud providers. We we are great partners with some of the cloud providers especially in burst mode. There's a mathematical optimization where if we can run on our own infra most of the time and burst to cloud when we need to that's kind of like the optimal cost structure. But but but I do think the vision is we want all 130 million of those creators and users to participate in making games.

Um take me through some of the other AI initiatives that are rolling out across Roblox right now. I was fascinated by uh the AI upresing uh technology. I've been very optimistic about that all over gaming. We've seen it early signs of it with DLSS, but uh clearly this is next generation technology. What's the what's the feedback been? What's the process like? How how

I think there's a little bit of a fun um boiled toad thing going on here. We're all used to what a game looks like. We've been all playing games for 10 or 20 years. We know what they look like and and we have an expectation of what we look like. I don't think any of us have the expectation that a game should be photorealistic at 4K 60 hertz like a movie like like that is something that's the province of movies right now offline video models that create super high-res and in our minds we haven't just connected like what could that be like our our vision and our dream and our hope is multiplayer gaming at photo realism 4K 60 hertz And we believe the best strategy for this is not pure 3D traditional gaming, not pure video world, you know, action systems and all of that, but a hybrid system that is is both optimizing the coordination of the thousand people in the multiplayer world with local super upresing for each user. And so that's, you know, that's what we published a blog post on. It's why we're working on this super upresing video model that we're going to incorporate. Uh we showed some early demos, more demos to come, but but we do believe it's almost going to be like going from black and white movies to color movies. No one has we just aren't used to a purely photorealistic feeling game. So if the successful that like the the keys to success as a UGC game creator uh sometimes it can be asset driven they can create something really high fidelity sometimes it can be uh they are able to actually instantiate the game quickly all of that's becoming easier with the two uh products you mentioned um what remains the secret sauce to a breakout UGC creator on Roblox? Yeah, I I think it's um there's a couple interesting factors here. The the overarching thing if if we take a step back that gaming provides us in society is really our belief like we think the world needs to be playing a little bit more like hanging out together using their imagination. You know, it's how we've evolved as humans and and play is just a good thing. We think that as far as the creation of these experiences, we're going to see more and more interesting ways for people to play together. I I feel it's a little bit like we've moved from oil painting to Photoshop. We're all going to get better at making digital assets and things like that, but there's going to be enormous room for creativity around what type of environments we play in. Um we're all going to feel more powerful um creating those environments. We're going to have the same opportunities I think for many of the large teams on Roblox that are big studios now, but we will also have opportunities for firsttime creators just as sometimes firsttime video producers get a breakout hit. I I do think we're going to make that that possible as well.

Yeah, I'm curious how you're thinking about um you know using AI not just to to build the games but also like within the games. So, like, you know, I I think everyone who's who's used these models has had this idea of like, oh, this would be an incredible NPC, right, in a game. You can talk to it. It has this incredible, you know, ability to to respond to what you're doing. I'm curious how how Roblox is thinking about, you know, using models.

I would say yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Both NPC creation as as well as dynamic world creation as well. You know, you one can imagine um a a gaming world where like in the movie Inception, there's a dream master who can modify the whole world for other people in real time. That's a very complicated computational challenge. Um you know, folding the road over in that dream sequence and inception, but dynamic world generation, I think we're going to see in real time. also NPCs, you know, both um not just uh doppelgangers and digital twins and every single sci-fi movie we've ever seen. There's another really interesting aspect for NPCs and that it's very hard um I I think it's much harder in the gaming industry to figure out is that thing going to work or is it going to be interesting. We we've seen so much success in code acceleration because we can define it. We can write a test plan. We can do iterative loops. we can let it go all night and get better and better. A game is a lot more difficult to define what is good. I think we're going to see more and more NPCs used as testing agents. And the interesting thing about NPCs is rather than trying to write a test plan, well, like let's put a hundred random NPCs in a game, give them the same mission as a human and see how they perform. The fun thing about really extrapolating to the future with a lot of compute and a lot of inference is those NPCs could conceivably run a hundred times faster than humans. So it's it's feasible to imagine a a 100 player test for 100 hours with NPCs being compressed down to an hour. That starts to introduce the notion of Wigums loop programming for game creators initially with NPCs.

Uh you mentioned Inception. The whole team's nodding because they all just saw it in 70 millimeter in theaters because it was re-released. Uh they they love that. Uh what about uh Roblox the movie or IP that is developed in Roblox going to the big screen? We saw backrooms a blender project very successful summer blockbuster. What's the future of that pipeline?

Uh we are looking into it. We've been really conservative because what we've always imagined Roblox as a IP factory where new IPs that are not coming from the movie angle are coming from the you know dress to impress and grow a garden angle. I just went and bought some dress to impress physical toys. So I think we're we're looking at how maybe in the future we would accelerate less of Roblox and more of those creators. It's fun to imagine a future where the brands of those creators um supports property. So I would say a lot of opportunity there.

Uh how is advertising developing in Roblox? It feels like AI unlocks uh it just lowers the cost of actually doing a branded integration. Uh someone who's a non-technical marketer can potentially come to you and say I want a a physical instantiation of my store. I want to do some sort of stunt. and you can say, "Yeah, like this will just be a couple tokens. It's going to be a couple hundred bucks."

I think you're exactly right. Um, what we're we're we're experimenting as well, even the descriptions of experiences, the thumbnails that creators make, all of that is starting to become AI and dynamically generated. I would also say as our discovery tool moments more and more starts to become front and center in the product, that's a much more advertising format a lot of young people are used to. Um also our our onplatform advertising business which is creators in addition to using our recommendation algorithm boosting by buying advertising on our homepage is going very well and then as you mentioned we're seeing continued growth in both brand integration as well as uh video advertising as well. Um uh sorry I did I did um sorry uh it's very funny um uh how how are you thinking about um new platforms new consoles uh just the general strategy of of the Roblox footprint? Are we past peak new platform or is there are there more surfaces that you want to expand onto? Uh, I know three surfaces right now. We're doing early experiments with Android TV, which is exactly the same Roblox client. Yeah, many experiences on Roblox that are not um, you know, super high Twitch related are super interesting there. I think there's a huge opportunity um, to be on all TV platforms. Of course, um, we really uh, respect Nintendo and Switch. um continuing to talk with them. We do think Roblox should be on that device. And then as we start to see all this collection of AR glasses and VR headsets starting to pop out,

you know, we're we're going to see more and more maturation of what is kind of the standardized AR AR form factor, which is heads-up display overlaid on glasses, ultimately projection. That's a real interesting platform for 3D communication as well. So, we're tracking that. And of course, we're uh big fans of MetaQuest and Roblox is live there and a lot of people play in VR right now.

Yeah. In in general, the the glasses format. I mean, there's been some some exciting launches, Snap Spectacles and the Metarband displays, but it feels like we're in a little bit of like a like a AR VR winter in the sense of like it's it's just wait for the next major iteration. We're just sort of in between cycles. Is that what you feel? I think there's a huge AR glasses opportunity once we get speaker, microphone, camera, projection, lightweight, all working together. Everyone's dancing around the edge of it. Arguably the Google Glass from 10 years ago, I feel was on the right track. What's the lightest wearable everyday option? So, so I I feel we may be in an AR winter. I'm not sure, but I I'm very optimistic about that form factor.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh it's Yeah. It's it's interesting. I'm I I'm such a VR bull, but at the same time, when I see uh just rumors about, oh, this next great uh display was cancelled or something like that, I'm

Yeah. I I mean, VR and AR are super different. I I I had the privilege of trying on a VPL data glove literally when Jiren Laneir ran the first um you know VR system at on SGIS. So I saw it super early.

Um so I I'm super optimistic about AR

or what what about uh like screenless experiences? I mean, there's a lot of uh like smart speakers and the meta-array bands that don't have the displays have an uh an AI that you can talk to. Um, and I'm wondering like is there is there is there any opportunity for a Roblox creator to create a game that I I mean there are games on Amazon Alexa. Uh, and I'm wondering if there's any Roblox creator that could potentially create a game that doesn't require a screen at least for part of the experience. I think the more um Roblox is not thought of just as a game or a platform but incredibly high performance lowcost infrastructure that's available to everyone.

That infrastructure is both single player and multiplayer. It's 2D and it's 3D. It can be on low-end devices and high-end. And and as that infrastructure more and more incorporates NPCs and audio and those types of things, you can imagine crossover type games that involve NPC interaction jumping from those with a visual display to pure NPC interaction. So I I would say we're you know very focused on providing highquality lowcost infrastructure throughout the platform and I think also focused on where it makes sense from performance and privacy whether it's our voice safety models our text filter models our super upsampler model that we've announced uh NPC model uh game creation coding models scene gen model singlepart um creation model. Uh there's many of these where we feel we have the data to build world class and kind of put it all together in our build harness.

What What is your like overarching philosophy on where certain pieces of the the safety and KYC infrastructure should live? Because uh I mean I have kids, they're not playing games yet, but I imagine they will at some point. Uh I'm probably going to have an opinion about the amount of screen time. I'm probably going to do some research on what the right amount is. Some of that can live at the device level. Some of it can live at the application level. Some of it can live just at the the parenting paying attention level. Um, how do you think about the different pieces of the puzzle? Where identification lives, where screen time lives, where different filters live. Is this an important trade-off with

the top big discussion in DC, right? What responsibility do device manufacturers have? Do they have to tag the age of every device? I I would roll back all the way to Roblox values. One of the four is we are responsible. And that value has led us to in a way uh

shutting off a phone call

on my Apple Macintosh. Sorry about that. I hope you don't hear that.

Um

so that has led me to um Sorry about that.

You're good.

Problem of having integrated phone on your PC. that has led us to um taking responsibility and doing a few big moves. Uh no te no sharing image or video um age checking now everyone on the platform. So both AI and biometric signals and really being unique in in leading that charge. We ultimately will take every age signal we can get whether DC mandates it from a device whether we collect it and we we just get higher and higher resolution but we're not waiting for a law or for device manufacturers to do that like we're we're already done like we're already ageing everyone and using that to ban communication and and monitor content. Uh the other thing I I would highlight is there's no silver bullet there in that even with device age check. So many parents are so busy that so many devices get handed around the the household. just go take my phone, go take my tablet.

That it it that we will have young people, we will have nine-year-olds on devices that are age checked for 18 that there is some reliable um rob reliability and constantly doing continuous age checking like we do.

Yeah. I mean, the funniest example I can remember is uh there's this old Twitter exchange where uh presumably a young woman got uh banned from using Twitter by her parents and so she logged into her Samsung smart fridge and sent a tweet. It was like I'm back online and it just shows you like kids are so ingenious like they will get around things. So, you have to have layers of protections at every level and there's no there's no one-sizefits-all approach, which I think is your

That's exactly right.

Yeah. I I'm curious how you're thinking about safety, especially in regards to AI. I mean, every time a new Frontier model comes out, you'll see someone within like an hour who's jailbroken and they have this crazy prompt and you can get the model to say all these like crazy stuff. Um, so I'm wondering how you're thinking about that, especially in terms of these these like large language models,

like red teaming. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah, I would say we're going further than that in that now for um everyone on our platform under 16 right now. They're they have a huge corpus of content. It's called Kids and Select Content. It's well over 20,000 games, but these are going through a fairly excruciating both user funnel as well as moderation funnel. A and in a way, it's working really wonderfully. That's an enormous amount of content. At the same time, it's not the full UGC catalog of millions and millions of things. Um, and because we have age check, we can push it there. The vision with build is we have the ability in build um that we don't fully have in studio where everything's being created by a prompt where we can see a history of all the prompts that have been used to create a game as well as um ultimately the images that have been uploaded, the models, all of those kind of things to really make a similar determination on the quality of that content. Whereas when you use a wide openen IDE, whether it's Roblox Studio or VS Code or whatever, you probably can make anything. And so we we are optimistic we will keep the same safety gauntlet for experiences created by build. We're we're also really optimistic that because our discovery system is so unique to gaming, it's it's very much based on estimated long-term retention based on direct measurement that our discovery team's pretty optimistic even if there's 20 times more games being created. One could have the fear, oh my gosh, we're going to get a lot of AI slop. But, you know, we already have millions of people making games. Some of them are amazing. They're not all amazing. They need to make it through um a high retention gauntlet before they start really being surfaced. So the the beauty of this is we think our current discovery systems are already perfectly poised for the expansion of creation from build.

Yeah, this is the aggregator thesis that you're already filtering everything and you're set up for it. Um, how are you thinking about uh intellectual property on Roblox in this where it gets even easier to make games and and experiences? Um, there have been some artists and IP owners that have been more lean forward on Yeah, remix my songs or use my likeness. Uh, Sora had this weird cameo feature that I thought was pretty elegantly implemented where uh someone could go in and say anyone like Jake Paul was like anyone can make can remix my image. I want to be all over the internet. Other people said, don't put me in any videos that you generate. Uh, and I'm wondering if there's uh like what the long-term relationship with different pieces of IP. Some filmmakers might want a bunch of free UGC games that promote their movie. Uh, and some might not want any of their IP to leak into Roblox. How are you treating that?

Yeah. So we um you know that relationship between IP holders and current creators and game developers is really complicated. There's there's multiple countries. There's Hollywood contracts like like uh having imagining a small one or two person shop going and getting a license to some big IP is somewhat unfathomable. We we do believe the future of this is just like Roblox solving it in a systemsoriented way. We we have a platform right now that is somewhat new called IP manager where we want and we are running the gamut all the way from some pieces of IP which hey we're open for licensing. We want multiple creators to come and use our IP. um the IP from the movie Saw is in our IP manager and and so a a creator who's interested in using that IP can directly contact, you know, do an online contract and start producing something from that. But that that IP manager can also act as an IP controller as well. and IP can go up there more and and the more that AI gets good at auto scanning and auto detecting can also be some companies that to say no one anywhere should be using RIP. So I think we we're viewing this as a systems opportunity and just like the democratization of gaming we want more creators making interesting games democratization of the licensing process. Yeah, I mean I've been really optimistic about AI solving this because I've watched firsthand how YouTube has dealt with it where you put a song in immediately the royalties just go over there you don't make money but that artist does and most artists are fine with that and then they always have the option to click that button say actually I don't want that at all and it's not perfect everyone has approvals at the right time but it's like this stable equilibrium where I think everyone gets what's economically viable

I'm very optimistic like this will ultimately be a solved problem.

Yeah, it's exciting. Well, congratulations on build. Congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

July 28th, build goes into alpha.

July 28th. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great Thursday. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

Great to see you.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. own the data platform that powers it. Um, uh, in creator world, there is some news from Colin Samir. Lexus is now the official car of Colin and Samir. What does that actually mean? They made four ads for them that roll AC that roll out across YouTube. They're sponsoring four videos on their channel. It's the first of its kind deal uh that represents a broader shift taking place in media. The aperture of what it means for a brand to work with a creator is changing quickly. It's very cool to see because obviously they've been on YouTube for a long time. They've done a lot of like host red ads, midroll ads, but this is a much deeper integration and something that I think will be uh hopefully replicated all over YouTube and be a new source of revenue for um for creators of all kinds. So, I was excited to see this. Uh, in other entertainment news, uh, Jake, uh, from Econ CM PIC, uh, Economic, uh, says, "This is almost hard to believe. Disney spent $129 billion acquiring Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, ESPN, and Fox, which is 182 billion in today's dollars. Throw in all their legacy assets, and the entire company's market cap today is $169 billion."

Wow. Do you know what this picture is missing?

Uh, which what do you mean picture?

So, so they're saying they acquired all these assets and the company is only worth $169 billion. What's missing from this analysis?

The cash that's been returned to shareholders. Disney across uh dividends and buybacks has returned like 70 billion maybe more to shareholders, which is I don't know. I just thought enough for and it is it is it is an interesting angle because they have spent a lot acquiring and the company is not worth more than what they acquired. So there's this question of like were those were those acquisitions accreative or destructive uh or dilutive but uh there is a whole separate picture which is that uh a lot of cash has been returned to shareholders throughout this journey.

Yeah. Also I mean that the mechanism with w with with which those acquisitions were funded also yeah should

Yeah. matters a lot. I don't know it was sort of interesting. Uh Sean Frank has a pitch. He says you should move to New York City, bro. You got to move to NYC. The weather horrible. 100 degrees. Easy. AC. F that. Taxes so high. Rent highest in the country. Air quality some of the worst in America. Tech, bro. We banned W. Do they really ban Whimo in New York?

Uh I believe so. Yeah.

Whimos.

Wow, that's very wild. Uh yeah, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Uh so I don't know. Do you ever have aspirations to move to New York City?

Uh, at some point it seems

you've been to New York City. Yeah. What do you think? It's a nice city. That's the thing is that all of this is true and it's still a great city to hang out in. It's so fun, so dense. You can see so many people walk around. It's beautiful. It's just like I don't know. It's unlike anything else. Still great. But uh, yeah.

You never lived in New York City?

I've never lived in New York City, but I've spent like a lot of time there. So, I've had a good time. Anyway, let me tell you about Codeex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Um, and there's some there there's some other news in the timeline, but we can go over it more next week. Uh, Eli Liy is buying psychedelics firm Atai Beckley for an initial $2.8 billion. At Thai was founded by Christian Angermmer. I've actually interviewed him years ago. uh fascinating deal working on psychedelics and a bunch of other things, therapeutics for mental health conditions. Uh huge deal going on there. And uh there's a few other stories, but we can get to them tomorrow. We're off tomorrow. There's some travel going on, but we'll be back Monday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific sharp. Thank you to everyone who tuned in in the chat. Thank you for uh positive reviews of Tyler. Let us know what you think of Tyler. Leave us a review on Apple Podcast and Spotify. write us an email. Uh tell us how he did. I think he did fantastic.

Have the best Thursday of your life.

Yes. There you go. That's a good impression. That's a good impression. Um but uh but thank you. Sign up for a newsletter at tvpn.com and we will see you on Monday.

See you.

Goodbye.

Flashbang.

Oh, we got the flashbang. There we go.