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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. 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.
Yeah, thank you.
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 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 on our platform so they don't dump to other platforms where they may share images or where they may communicate without text monitoring.
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.
I want to highlight a couple of things.
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.
This is age estimation. The AI is really good.
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.
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.
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 way slightly free.
Up the communication.
If you and I were fourteen on roadblocks and you called me a butt head, I wouldn't see it.
We'd see a bunch of hashtags.
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.
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 does this new technology fit into the daily run of that game and how players and users interact with one another.
Yeah, thanks for highlighting grow a Garden.
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.
For any game in the history of gaming.
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.
With the release of this.
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.
Right Dave, is grow a Go the biggest game you've had ever?
Well, I think it's been very public.
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.
And just very quickly, Dave, would you just define largest concurrent played.
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.
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?
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, 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.
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 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.
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 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.
It's thirteen and under and eighteen and nine.
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