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

Dave Baszucki: 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. 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. 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. So that's more world-building as content. That is exactly right. And so if you put those at 2 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.

Dave Baszucki: 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. And we could always do that, but we'd be able to do things we could never do on Zoom. You know, 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 other thing for business is there's a few things that 4D, and I use 4D 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 you're having a company meeting of 1000 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. If 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.

Dave Baszucki: 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. And when 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 latents. 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 latents? Is it a much more native 3D format? Is it a hybrid 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 store it in vector, which means the ability to play back anything that's ever happened on Roblox, that's 13 billion hours a month.

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 think 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 got a long runway on it. So you could imagine more diversity or quality of 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.