Finding it hard to keep up with AI research? Roblox's CEO says you're not alone

• Roblox CEO David Baszucki said that a recent attempt to understand all of the latest AI research was "humbling."
• "It is hard to get to a position where you can understand all of those research papers," he said on the "Access" podcast.
• Baszucki, who did the reading while on sabbatical, concluded that AI research in the 3D space was still very early.

New AI research is published at a steady clip, sometimes daily, and often featuring increasingly technical terms and concepts. How do you keep up?

Roblox CEO David Baszucki recognizes the struggle. On the "Access" podcast, the executive was asked about his recent sabbatical, where he'd spent some delving into AI.

"It was very humbling," Baszucki said. "It is hard to get to a position where you can understand all of those research papers."

Baszucki founded Roblox in 2005. In the company's early days, the CEO said that he read "all the research," from physics simulation to rendering technology.

"People were thinking about all of these new ways of doing gaming, and generally I could understand all of it," he said.

Then came the "horizontal wave" of AI research, which Baszucki called "so massive and so fast." From transformers to diffusion and world models, there's "a lot going on," he said.

Over the past few years, AI research has expanded from an academic subject to a national interest. Major tech companies, such as Meta and Microsoft, have developed in-house research labs — and awarded lucrative compensation packages to top AI researchers.

There are signs that AI research is becoming more private. In 2023, Google informed its staff that it would reduce the amount of AI research it published.

"Now it's time to compete and keep knowledge in house," a Google Brain staffer told Business Insider in 2023 of the company's philosophy.

While much of the AI industry is now focused on scaling compute, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever recently said that research itself was the key to unlocking the tech's future.

"It's back to the age of research again, just with big computers," he said.

As for Roblox, Baszucki's conclusion from his deep dive into the latest research was that it's still "very early in the 3D space."

Baszucki called AI a "very physically unnatural space," fed on human-made text and images.

"We're training AI models on this thing we made up," he said, rather than "on the 3D raw material of the world itself."