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