July 17, 2025 • 8 mins
Roblox CEO David Baszucki discusses Roblox's new selfie-based AI age verification for its young users. He speaks with Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Gaming platform Roadblocks is introducing a new feature for verifying
users ages. Take a selfie and the AI will estimate
the user's age. If the tech determines they're over thirteen,
then the user will have access to the new Trusted
Connections feature where they can chat freely with other Roadblocks users.
(00:28):
Delighted to say that joining us now is Roadblocks is
CEO David Bazooki, DA, good morning. Thank you for being
back on Bloomberg Tech. I find the tech so interesting here.
Could we just go over the basics of how it
works and why this is the right technology for this issue.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
We've been innovating on safety and civility for almost twenty years,
and what we're rolling out today is our vision for
age based communication. Age based communication, especially for teens thirteen
through seven, which is a vulnerable time, involves a couple things. First,
trusted connections, so identifying friends and people that you know
(01:10):
and trust, and second, using age estimation to enable trusted
connections to actually allow those teams to speak a little
more freely on our platform, even though we do scan
the text for critical harms. And this is super important
because business notwithstanding, engagement notwithstanding, we're trying to keep people
(01:32):
on our platform so they don't dump to other platforms
where they may share images or where they may communicate
without text monitoring.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Dave, the skeptic here, will say, well, well, how good
is the AI? How can the video and an AI
analysis of it, analysis of it guarantee a correct result
that the person using it is indeed age thirteen or older.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I want to highlight a couple of things.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We've been innovating on AI for four years plus and
we're running over two hundred AI systems. We've open sourced
our voice moderation system because it's so good, and we've
really advanced the state of the art and text moderation
systems as well.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
This is age estimation. The AI is really good.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's not perfect, of course, but we're leaning conservative in
that case, and I'll highlight we're using this in a
conservative way to enable freer communication that is still monitored.
So we've really thought a lot about it, and we
think this is the future of how teens will communicate.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
In testing. What is the proportion bin of sort of
false positives and accurate results? And is there an element
of sort of human moderation in the first instance.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, well, I want to highlight for historically there's always
been an element of moderation on roadblocks, and all texts,
all voice, all images has always gone through moderation, including
AI and human moderation. So we have such a firm
foundation for safety. We're using age estimation to in a
(03:13):
way slightly free.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Up the communication.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
If you and I were fourteen on roadblocks and you
called me a butt head, I wouldn't see it.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
We'd see a bunch of hashtags.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
But it's the kind of thing a lot of teens
like to chat about, and when it's with people you
know and trust, we're open to letting them communicate more
freely in that way.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Dave is probably really helpful to put this in the
context of a case study example, and Grow a Garden
is probably the best right. So if you just bear
with me, and then we bring it back to product safety,
there are all of these teenagers wanting to be on
Grow a Garden and then share with their peers, right
their friends, that their community of a similar age. How
(03:54):
does this new technology fit into the daily run of
that game and how players and users interact with one another.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, thanks for highlighting grow a Garden.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Just as last summer, Dressed to Impress was going crazy
on roadblocks. Right now, grow a Garden has hit over
twenty million people playing it at the same time, which
is actually a record, we believe.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
For any game in the history of gaming.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
People really want to hang out with their friends and communicate,
and up until now, if you and I were fifteen
and we were trying to communicate once again, we might
see some hashes and some blocking when we're trying to
compete in the game.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
With the release of this.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
If we are trusted connections and we can validate we're
people we know and we trust, and then we take
a selfie to estimate our age, we're going to be
able to communicate more freely and have possibly more fun
and grow a Garden and be less likely to go
to some other platform where maybe we start sharing selfies
or things that we don't allow on roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Right Dave, is grow a Go the biggest game you've
had ever?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Well, I think it's been very public.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
A couple of weekends ago we hit over thirty million
people on roadblocks playing at the same time, and for
a moment in time, grow a Garden hit over twenty
million people playing at the same time. It's not just
the biggest we've ever had on Roadblocks. That is, we
believe the largest concurrent player of any game in history.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And just very quickly, Dave, would you just define largest
concurrent played.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
We believe from the Guinness Book of World Records that
twenty million is the largest concurrent players of any game
in real time in history.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Okay, understood. What many people don't appreciate about Roadblocks is
the scale of your own infrastructure. I think that you
that you run yourself. You have a lot of footprint
on prem with all the activity. Are your servers and
CPUs just melting on Friday and Saturday nights or how
are you handling all of the traffic right now?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, we do like it when our servers melt, as
long as we stay live and we stay up. And
what we have done over the last couple of years
is abstracted all of this infrastructure we have, and you're
absolutely correct. We believe we get better performance, better reliability,
and better cost building out all of our own data
centers around the world. We have started working with partners though,
(06:24):
and you know those partners as you're Amazon AWSGCP at
peak times to burst into their cloud as well, so
we can run all of our own infro, but for
Saturday morning for two hours, we're actually relying on some
of these partners to hit those peaks.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Dave Roadblocks has been subject to a lot of scrutiny
over child safety, the feature that you're announcing today, but
also the sort of technological capability for you as the
leader of this company. Where does it rank and what
you think will sort of address those historic issues but
also just allow you to move forward in growing because
you have an ambition right to capture ten percent of
(07:04):
the market, and I'm just trying to understand how this
piece of tech allows you to tap into a demographic
that will get you there.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
We've been focusing on safety civility as top priority for
almost twenty years. We believe this is the future of
communication on social platforms, especially for teens, and we believe
the future will be for teens in that vulnerable time,
trusted connections plus some form of age estimation or verification
(07:35):
or maybe someday help from the phone vendors and other things,
but ultimately for private chat. We believe this is the future.
So we're we haven't been waiting for the law. We
haven't been waiting for legislation. We've We think this thirteen
through seventeen segment is just as important.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
It's thirteen and under and eighteen and nine.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
We didn't even get to advertising on the platform. All
of the millionaires that are being minted through platform. Dave Bazooki,
you have to come back, CEO of Roadblocks. Thank you
very much
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Gaming platform Roadblocks is introducing a new feature for verifying
users ages. Take a selfie and the AI will estimate
the user's age. If the tech determines they're over thirteen,
then the user will have access to the new Trusted
Connections feature where they can chat freely with other Roadblocks users.
(00:28):
Delighted to say that joining us now is Roadblocks is
CEO David Bazooki, DA, good morning. Thank you for being
back on Bloomberg Tech. I find the tech so interesting here.
Could we just go over the basics of how it
works and why this is the right technology for this issue.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
We've been innovating on safety and civility for almost twenty years,
and what we're rolling out today is our vision for
age based communication. Age based communication, especially for teens thirteen
through seven, which is a vulnerable time, involves a couple things. First,
trusted connections, so identifying friends and people that you know
(01:10):
and trust, and second, using age estimation to enable trusted
connections to actually allow those teams to speak a little
more freely on our platform, even though we do scan
the text for critical harms. And this is super important
because business notwithstanding, engagement notwithstanding, we're trying to keep people
(01:32):
on our platform so they don't dump to other platforms
where they may share images or where they may communicate
without text monitoring.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Dave, the skeptic here, will say, well, well, how good
is the AI? How can the video and an AI
analysis of it, analysis of it guarantee a correct result
that the person using it is indeed age thirteen or older.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I want to highlight a couple of things.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We've been innovating on AI for four years plus and
we're running over two hundred AI systems. We've open sourced
our voice moderation system because it's so good, and we've
really advanced the state of the art and text moderation
systems as well.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
This is age estimation. The AI is really good.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's not perfect, of course, but we're leaning conservative in
that case, and I'll highlight we're using this in a
conservative way to enable freer communication that is still monitored.
So we've really thought a lot about it, and we
think this is the future of how teens will communicate.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
In testing. What is the proportion bin of sort of
false positives and accurate results? And is there an element
of sort of human moderation in the first instance.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, well, I want to highlight for historically there's always
been an element of moderation on roadblocks, and all texts,
all voice, all images has always gone through moderation, including
AI and human moderation. So we have such a firm
foundation for safety. We're using age estimation to in a
(03:13):
way slightly free.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Up the communication.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
If you and I were fourteen on roadblocks and you
called me a butt head, I wouldn't see it.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
We'd see a bunch of hashtags.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
But it's the kind of thing a lot of teens
like to chat about, and when it's with people you
know and trust, we're open to letting them communicate more
freely in that way.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Dave is probably really helpful to put this in the
context of a case study example, and Grow a Garden
is probably the best right. So if you just bear
with me, and then we bring it back to product safety,
there are all of these teenagers wanting to be on
Grow a Garden and then share with their peers, right
their friends, that their community of a similar age. How
(03:54):
does this new technology fit into the daily run of
that game and how players and users interact with one another.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, thanks for highlighting grow a Garden.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Just as last summer, Dressed to Impress was going crazy
on roadblocks. Right now, grow a Garden has hit over
twenty million people playing it at the same time, which
is actually a record, we believe.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
For any game in the history of gaming.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
People really want to hang out with their friends and communicate,
and up until now, if you and I were fifteen
and we were trying to communicate once again, we might
see some hashes and some blocking when we're trying to
compete in the game.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
With the release of this.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
If we are trusted connections and we can validate we're
people we know and we trust, and then we take
a selfie to estimate our age, we're going to be
able to communicate more freely and have possibly more fun
and grow a Garden and be less likely to go
to some other platform where maybe we start sharing selfies
or things that we don't allow on roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Right Dave, is grow a Go the biggest game you've
had ever?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Well, I think it's been very public.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
A couple of weekends ago we hit over thirty million
people on roadblocks playing at the same time, and for
a moment in time, grow a Garden hit over twenty
million people playing at the same time. It's not just
the biggest we've ever had on Roadblocks. That is, we
believe the largest concurrent player of any game in history.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And just very quickly, Dave, would you just define largest
concurrent played.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
We believe from the Guinness Book of World Records that
twenty million is the largest concurrent players of any game
in real time in history.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Okay, understood. What many people don't appreciate about Roadblocks is
the scale of your own infrastructure. I think that you
that you run yourself. You have a lot of footprint
on prem with all the activity. Are your servers and
CPUs just melting on Friday and Saturday nights or how
are you handling all of the traffic right now?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, we do like it when our servers melt, as
long as we stay live and we stay up. And
what we have done over the last couple of years
is abstracted all of this infrastructure we have, and you're
absolutely correct. We believe we get better performance, better reliability,
and better cost building out all of our own data
centers around the world. We have started working with partners though,
(06:24):
and you know those partners as you're Amazon AWSGCP at
peak times to burst into their cloud as well, so
we can run all of our own infro, but for
Saturday morning for two hours, we're actually relying on some
of these partners to hit those peaks.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Dave Roadblocks has been subject to a lot of scrutiny
over child safety, the feature that you're announcing today, but
also the sort of technological capability for you as the
leader of this company. Where does it rank and what
you think will sort of address those historic issues but
also just allow you to move forward in growing because
you have an ambition right to capture ten percent of
(07:04):
the market, and I'm just trying to understand how this
piece of tech allows you to tap into a demographic
that will get you there.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
We've been focusing on safety civility as top priority for
almost twenty years. We believe this is the future of
communication on social platforms, especially for teens, and we believe
the future will be for teens in that vulnerable time,
trusted connections plus some form of age estimation or verification
(07:35):
or maybe someday help from the phone vendors and other things,
but ultimately for private chat. We believe this is the future.
So we're we haven't been waiting for the law. We
haven't been waiting for legislation. We've We think this thirteen
through seventeen segment is just as important.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
It's thirteen and under and eighteen and nine.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
We didn't even get to advertising on the platform. All
of the millionaires that are being minted through platform. Dave Bazooki,
you have to come back, CEO of Roadblocks. Thank you
very much
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