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

**Elad Gil** (0:00)
What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI throughout their lifetime?

**Dave Baszucki** (0:05)
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.

**Sarah Guo** (0:36)
Hi, listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elad and I are here with Dave Baszucki, 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's 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.

**Dave Baszucki** (1:08)
It is so great to be here and thank you for doing this in Roblox headquarters.

**Elad Gil** (1:12)
Well, exciting to be here.

**Dave Baszucki** (1:14)
Yeah, great to have you guys. Thanks.

**Elad Gil** (1:16)
I think we want 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? We just love to hear your views of big picture 10 years from now. Where are we going? What's coming?

**Dave Baszucki** (1:41)
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 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.
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.

**Elad Gil** (2:28)
It's like a Ready Player One, the movie.

**Dave Baszucki** (2:30)
Exactly. So we do have that business plan slide. What we had always imagined is if this high fidelity space was back 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? And 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 holodeck forever. There is another interesting vision, and I think it's useful comparing these product things, there'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. It'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 2 a.m. 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 pre-built 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.