David Baszucki, Roblox CEO, joins 'Closing Bell Overtime' to talk Roblox's new open-source AI, the safety controls it is implementing, and why AI is part of humanity's future.

San Mateo

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

Roblox is introducing a new AI model that enables users to generate 3D objects within the platform using plain text commands. The announcement was made at the company's developer conference. Roblox CEO David Baszucki elaborated on the model, which aims to simplify game creation and allow users to build items in a 3D space, marking a shift from traditional 1D and 2D AI applications like text and images.

The new AI technology, named Cube 3D, is being shipped this quarter and will be open source, enhancing accessibility for developers and creators. Baszucki emphasized the shift towards more immersive game development on the Roblox platform, noting that this innovation could democratize game creation, allowing users with no design skills to build and even sell items.

Roblox is also opening this model's code to the public on GitHub, promoting collaboration and further development. The open-source approach has been previously implemented by Roblox to improve voice models, now applied to their 3D foundational models. The move is designed to harness the extensive 3D content available within Roblox, promoting safety and civility across the platform through collaboration in open-source consortia.

Baszucki discussed the economic implications of AI-assisted creation, drawing parallels with historical shifts in image creation technology. He expressed optimism that AI would lead to improved creativity and quality of content on the platform rather than replace human creators. The CEO highlighted that such innovations could broaden participation in game and content development, enriching the experiences available on Roblox.



Roblox CEO: AI is powering human acceleration, not human replacement

Roblox is rolling out a preview of its new AI model at the company's developer conference this week allowing people to generate objects via plain text. Roblox CEO David Pazucki joins us now in an exclusive interview along with our own Steve Kovacs. Steve. Hey David, thank you so much for joining us on this day, day after rather, after you announced that big AI model. Thanks for joining us. Steve, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. So Dave, we talk so much about these chatbots, they're text-based, you can have text conversations with them, now there's some voice incorporated, you can generate images. What we don't see so often are 3D generated AI chatbots or AI models that let you build into these video games and that seems to be what you guys announced this week. Can you talk a little bit about this? Because the way I'm reading it is that eventually people are going to be able to, maybe you don't have the design skills to build and sell stuff in Roblox. This will make it a little bit easier for people like me, maybe, to start getting into Roblox and start making these items, start selling these items. When are we going to start seeing these things go for sale, AI generated items on sale for Robux on the platform? Hey Steve, it's bigger even than things being for sale. It's really the future of not just how games are created, but how games are even played on the platform. You can imagine if you and I were walking down the street and whether we like cars or houses or fashion, and we were simply talking, like I would like a red sports car or I would like a piece of clothing like this, we're introducing and literally shipping this quarter 3D in-game generation, which means the ability for anyone who wants to be a creator to create interesting things just by talking about it. And you mentioned that very correctly. AI has typically been in the 1D or the 2D space, text or images. We're moving to 3D and ultimately moving to full game creation with what we're calling Cube 3D, our foundational model built from the bottom up inside Roblox. So Dave, we're just showing some pictures of that product in action. You're also making this open source. I think this is a really interesting moment to talk about open source because today, Metalama, they announced they had one billion downloads already. DeepSeek, of course, changed the entire conversation around generative AI. It's also an open source model. You guys are making this open source. You guys are going to put it out, I believe, on GitHub later this week so people can start playing around with it. How does that benefit Roblox, though, when other people can use this technology to use it elsewhere? I think 3D foundational models are something we're going to continue to be expert at because we have so much good 3D content to build this model out of. And we started this actually in the safety and civility space. We open sourced our voice model, which all voice on Roblox runs through and has been shared and downloaded over 20,000 times. And we joined a open source consortium called Roost, including Google is in there, around open sourcing models for safety. Our 3D foundational model, we believe, can show really the amazing model we've built and allow other industries to take advantage of this as well. David, how much do you know at this point about the economic impact of plain language coding within the platform? Does this commoditize creation and flood the market with merchandise and, in effect, drive down the price of items or does it increase paid engagement? Yeah, I actually feel taking a step back, this is almost similar to when we were all drawing by hand or using oil paint to make imagery. And all of a sudden, an explosion of photography and digital tools came available. And we have so many more people participating in image creation. We're very optimistic. And what we see AI doing is powering human acceleration, not human replacement. We're going to see better creations. We're going to see our top creators on Roblox making more immersive, more amazing experiences. But we're also going to see you and me and others who never thought they could, for example, design and build a house, maybe build that house in Roblox in 3D by talking about the house, the shape, the size, the texture, the features. So this is akin to us to just another revolution in creation that's going to increase quality and span rather than replace people.

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Rise of AI