Roblox bills itself as a playground where kids’ imaginations can run wild, whether it’s re-creating digital versions of chain restaurants or staging entire movies.

Now, it’s looking to bring a fresh voice to another (higher-stakes) sandbox: Capitol Hill.

While execs from peer platforms like X, Discord, and Snap have been subpoenaed by Congress to testify about the dangers kids face online—and execs from others like Meta and TikTok have appeared voluntarily—Roblox public policy head Nicky Jackson Colaco said her platform isn’t waiting to be summoned.

In an interview with Tech Brew, Colaco said Roblox aims to be proactive and present itself as a partner for lawmakers who are working to balance child safety with the realities of online platforms. She added that AI has a big future for encouraging both civility and creativity on the platform.

“I believe that the intention of all these laws that we’re seeing now, and proposed regulations, are legitimately to keep children safe. And the question is, how do we do that in the right way?” she said. “There can be really productive conversations between tech companies and policymakers about how that happens. I think we’d really like to be part of those conversations.”

Continue reading here.—KG

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Do you hear that? That’s the sound of the tech press finally getting a chance to take a breath.

OpenAI and Google unloaded a barrage of announcements this past week, leading some enthusiasts to proclaim that the dystopian future from the 2013 movie Her had arrived, while more skeptical observers questioned where the AI hype has gotten us after months of breathless rollouts.

In any case, the week showed that competition between tech giants trying to own the generative AI space is still fierce, as the companies seemed determined to one-up one another in a race toward realizing multimodal all-purpose assistants.

We’ll get to the state of that arms race, but first, a quick recap of the news:

• No sign yet of GPT-5 or a rumored search competitor, but OpenAI announced on Monday a new model called GPT-4o (the “o” stands for “omni”) that will be widely available as part of ChatGPT’s free version. The company claimed the model is faster and cheaper than previous versions, with an improved understanding of vision and audio inputs.
• OpenAI employees wowed the audience with some on-stage demos of an intonation-heavy—and, as some observed, seductive—female voice for the new model interacting with images and performing translations. CEO Sam Altman claimed this voice mode would be available in “coming weeks.”
• Two OpenAI leaders—chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and alignment researcher Jan Leike—announced their departures from the company.

Continue reading here.—PK

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Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I lead a team of product managers who have to balance the needs of our users, both pros and homeowners, with business goals and technical constraints to decide what and how to build the best possible experience.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

We recently launched the biggest product update in Thumbtack’s history, which includes 30 new features that help homeowners care for and improve their homes. We discovered that homeowners were uncertain about how and where to start, which led them to procrastinate on home projects. To help them move past this uncertainty, the team completely redesigned the Thumbtack app experience, introducing features from personalized guides to project plans to AI search to DIY tools and more.

This new app is meant to simplify the process of homeownership and provide guidance on what projects to do, when to do them, and who to hire to get the most value out of your home. It was designed for today’s generation of digitally native homeowners who want to manage everything from their phones, but weren’t able to until now.

What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

Can it be the same thing? As someone who studied computational linguistics many years ago, the last year with generative AI has been absolutely stunning. For years, I’d get questions about robots being able to take over what humans do and I’d laugh it off and tell people not to worry: The technology was nowhere close to replacing humans. My younger self would be blown away at how far (and fast) generative AI has come.

Continue reading here.