Roblox's CEO on safety concerns, AI, and what's next
David Baszucki joined us this week on the ACCESS podcast. Also: GPT-5.2, Google's default contracts, and Meta buys Limitless.
This week on ACCESS, Ellis Hamburger and I are joined by Roblox CEO David Baszucki. We booked this interview well before his spicy appearance on the Hard Fork podcast a couple of weeks ago, which we naturally asked him about. Looking back, he told us he wishes he’d taken a more “patient” tone.
Roblox is one of the most important and undercovered platforms in tech. As Matthew Ball recently noted, time spent on Roblox is quickly approaching Netflix levels. On this week’s show, we pressed Baszucki on the criticisms he’s facing around kid safety, but we also wanted to understand how he actually runs the company. The metrics he tracks and the way he sets goals reveal a lot about how a platform like Roblox operates.
We also got into how his recent sabbatical shaped his thinking on AI, why world models are both a threat and an opportunity for Roblox, how he is approaching succession planning, and more.
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I launched ACCESS with my friend Ellis Hamburger and Vox Media in September. We’re 11 episodes in and have already had a bunch of great guests, including Mark Zuckerberg, Dylan Field, Eugenia Kuyda, Vlad Tenev, Raiza Martin, and more. We’re trying to make a fun and informative show about the tech industry’s inside conversation that features the people shaping it.
ACCESS and Sources are separate brands, but I think of them as part of the same cinematic universe. If you subscribe to this newsletter, I hope you’ll check the podcast out and let me know what you think. Ellis and I are excited to keep evolving the show in the coming months and welcome all feedback.
Growing a new show from scratch is hard, but the early support we’ve gotten so far has meant the world. Thanks to NEW ECONOMIES for featuring ACCESS in its “new titans of audio” overview this week. And a special shoutout to Techmeme founder (and Sources subscriber) Gabe Rivera for featuring the show on the site’s homepage.
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Feed check
The Verge’s Tom Warren: “I understand GPT-5.2 is ready to be released, and could appear as soon as early next week. Sources tell me the 5.2 update should close the gap that Google created with the release of Gemini 3 last month — a model that topped leaderboards and wowed Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.”
This is good: “Alphabet Inc.’s Google must renegotiate any contract to make its search engine or artificial intelligence app the default for smartphones and other devices every year, a federal judge ruled.”
OpenAI is getting too big for SF: “OpenAI is eyeing a lease for an office campus in Mountain View that’s large enough to accommodate well over 1,000 workers, a potential deal that would mark a major expansion for the artificial intelligence company.”
Limtless CEO Dan Siroker’s video explaining why he sold the company to Meta.
A chart showing OpenAI and Anthropic’s compared revenue growth over time.
