The Roblox Developers Conference is underway, and CEO and co-founder David Baszucki came out swinging at the keynote. We’re going to have a billion daily users! 10% of all global gaming revenue! We’re already having your kids! OK, not the last one, although it might as well have been, and you can read about Roblox’s naughty health and even naughtier goals here.
There was a hint of pipe dreaminess to some of the keynotes. But one really impressive moment came when Baszucki touched on AI, which Roblox has been gradually integrating into its content creation tools for years. It has a tool that helps automate texture creation, for example, but we clearly haven’t seen anything yet.
Roblox is developing a “3D foundational model” of AI that will be open source and will create 3D assets using text, video, and 3D prompts. Baszucki describes it as an “incubator project” with about 40 dedicated employees and says they’re only three months into it. He then shows a top-down view of a map being created with plain text prompts, which then becomes a desert, and then becomes a forest scene (with both text and image prompts).
Of course, this is a pre-recorded piece of stage presentation, so the above evidence of this AI model’s capabilities should be taken with a grain of salt.
“We’ve been building generative AI in Roblox for years with tools like Assistant, Texture Generator, and Avatar Auto Setup. But this is just the beginning of what we have planned,” Baszucki said. “We see a powerful future where Roblox experiences will have expanded generative AI capabilities to enable real-time creation integrated with gameplay—in a resource-efficient way that we can make available to everyone on the platform.”
The most intriguing promise is the idea of “real-time creation integrated with gameplay.” These tools already look impressive (albeit in demo form), and Baszucki didn’t specify a time frame, but if they can pull this off, it would be a leap forward in AI functionality in games that would have huge implications. Imagine a virtual D&D game where the world merges into existence, as the game master describes it. OK, with Roblox graphics, but still.
As if that wasn’t enough for the optimists among us, you could even tie the AI promises into the more subdued part of Baszucki’s presentation. The improvements to the platform’s backend and tech stack aren’t exactly headline news, even if things like improved app launch times, frame rates, and crash reductions make a gigantic difference to everyday gamers.
But Baszucki says the next step in these “platform efforts” is to enable a developer to “host a high-performance 100-player open-world, sports, or battle royale game on Roblox and run it on 2GB RAM devices anywhere in the world with good frame rates. We won’t stop until we can do that.”
I’m still waiting for my flying car, but in the meantime, I bet that participating in 100-person experiences created on the fly sounds amazing. It’s the kind of feature that, if it weren’t in Roblox, would make most of us cringe. Whether Roblox can deliver what it promises remains to be seen.
