Unique Research · Insight · October 25, 2023 · From a16z AI Revolution series with Jon · Original: a16z.com/leveling-up
Roblox is among the world’s largest multiplayer creation platforms: by 2019, 5M+ young developers were building 3D/VR content for 100M+ monthly active players — most experiences user-made, from FPS and RPG to racing and puzzles.
Generative AI in games — and beyond
Jon: How is AI changing how games get built on Roblox?
Dave: Think bigger than games — the ultimate way people communicate at a distance. During COVID: how kids stayed with friends; how people attended concerts together remotely; how offices simulate serendipity when some are remote (Roblox even prototypes its own office on Roblox).
If immersive 3D follows the same market forces as telephony, video chat, and SMS, the impact is enormous. Three layers: (1) AI users don’t even label as AI — personalization, safety/civility, voice/text monitoring, asset monitoring, real-time natural translation (quality people don’t notice); (2) generative tech now — code, 3D objects, characters, games; (3) future agents with general intelligence inside easy-to-create environments — a George Washington avatar for a 12-year-old’s school project; someday a 3D first date via a dating-app Roblox experience.
What parts of the game stack get hit first — concept, storyboard, writing, 2D, 3D, code, physics? Dave: almost ask what won’t be affected. Of ~65M Roblox users, most don’t create at the level they want. An early “Project Runway” sim with sewing machines and fabric was still too complex for most; with text/image/voice prompts — “blue denim shirt, cooler buttons, better fit” — creation accelerates.
Fully personalized play
Classic 3D uses Blender / 3D Studio / Maya; Roblox Studio too. Making Studio easier for 2M users is one layer; in-experience builders (tycoon, roller-coaster) with more object access and persistence are another. Goal: vertical experiences with cloud AI — not just a better Studio. Ultimate personalization needs massive real-time inference that watches your play history and generates a 3D experience nobody has seen. Roblox’s advantage: hundreds of thousands of servers, many edge DCs, megabit-class links built for 3D sim — run more inference cheaply and give creators free capacity.
Roblox’s generative models
Shareholder letter: Roblox is building multimodal generative models. At the surface there may be 20–30 specialized vertical apps (NL filtering ≠ generative 3D). Underneath, maybe 2–3 large general model clusters: safety/civility + NLP/translation; multimodal 3D creation; and virtual humans trained on ~5B hours of how people talk, move, and collaborate in 3D. Roblox sits a layer below frontier LLM labs — finely tuned domains, trained and served at scale on proprietary data. Hard problem they’re watching closely: high-quality 3D generation (2D is already rich).
Build vs buy: interested in partners for low-cost large-scale training and inference, hardware abstraction, and hybrid CPU/GPU runtimes.
Interfaces, creators, NPCs as copilots
Discovery (Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, YouTube) often optimizes short-term engagement over long-term platform value if breakout creations get buried. UI can shift from catalog to personalized feed — Roblox is testing 2D vs 3D, identity vs discovery, friends vs optimization weights.
Early AI tools (code assist, material generators) already accelerate creators; prompt-driven characters and general 3D assets will matter more. Optimistic that tens of millions can create inside experiences — fashion contests that crown future designers; racing talent discovered in sims.
NPCs as copilots/guides (not just co-players): prompt “George Washington at high formality who onboards new users through a Constitution experience, then leaves.” Copilots talking natural English across email/Slack/browser — and consumer real-time earpiece copilots — both interesting. Educational angle: talk to historical figures in Ancient Rome with friends.
VR, spatial computing, advice, AI Turing test
Meta Quest Roblox app: 1M downloads in first 5 beta days before full Oculus Store launch. Dave’s view: like the iPhone made 2D HTML default on small screens, immersive multiplayer 3D in the cloud should reach every device — phone less immersive but more spontaneous than VR. Market picks the consumption device; Roblox wants to be everywhere to watch that shift. Historically, 3D engineers tested primarily on low-end Android — forcing efficiency that helped Quest (two eyes, not one).
Best advice: not “follow passion” or “follow strength” alone — find the Venn overlap of what you’re great at and what you love. Bold 5-year AI prediction: a 1633-trained AI — if given a Turing-style test with period information — should eventually say the Sun is the center despite 99.9% of contemporary texts saying Earth is; at 5 years maybe, at 10 years yes.