Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters
Emilia David, Senior AI Reporter, VentureBeat
Emilia David comes from a long line of journalists. Her late mother, in fact, was a well-known and controversial Filipino political columnist. Her writing helped usher in women's reproductive rights in one of the world's most religiously conservative countries. So it was no surprise that Amelia got into journalism. Tech journalism, particularly AI, and in the United States, well, that's a much longer story.
Emilia joined us to tell that story, how she uses AI to help determine what is and is not a fit for her VentureBeat audience, and to talk about her unapologetic love for enterprise tech for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Emilia.
Here's our chat with Emilia. Enjoy.
Emilia David comes from a long line of journalists. Her late mother, in fact, was a well-known and controversial Filipino political columnist. Her writing helped usher in women's reproductive rights in one of the world's most religiously conservative countries. So it was no surprise that Emilia got into journalism. Tech journalism, particularly AI, and in the United States, well, that's a much longer story. Emilia joined us to tell that story, how she uses AI to help determine what is and is not a fit for her VentureBeat audience, and to talk about her unapologetic love for enterprise tech for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Emilia. Here's our chat with Emilia. Enjoy.
Emilia David:Thank you so much for having me.
Dave Reddy:We met a few months ago now at a Venture Beat AI show in San Francisco. It was one of the best shows I've been to in a long time. And so we're going to talk definitely about AI. And of course, I've I've done that at least twice on this show with your editorial director, Michael Nunez. But I want to start with you. So where did you grow up? Did you grow up in New York or the or the Philippines? I saw that you went to school in the Philippines.
Emilia David:Yeah, so no, I didn't grow up in New York. I grew up in the Philippines. I moved to New York to go to grad school, and I ended up getting a job and staying. And it's a constant process of if I want to stay or not, but so you're you may at some point go back.
Dave Reddy:Do you still have family there, I presume?
Emilia David:Most of my family are there. My immediate family are there. I do have a lot of relatives here in the U.S. that I can choose to spend the holidays with.
unknown:Good.
Dave Reddy:And you live in New York City now.
Emilia David:I do live in New York City, yeah.
Dave Reddy:Okay, correct. So what did mom and dad do? What was your upbringing like?
Emilia David:Sure. Well, my mom was actually a journalist. Really? The reason why I wanted to become a journalist. She used to, she has since passed, but it's okay. Thank you so much. Her death anniversary is actually on Wednesday. It'll be two years, but you know, she's she's watching over me and all of that. But yeah, so my mom was an opinion writer, a columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. She people call her like a political commentator, which is very interesting because she she doesn't just write about politics, but she is most known in the Philippines as a reproductive health advocate. So a lot of her, a lot of the journalism that she did really centered around women's rights and women's reproductive rights. And she was part of a group of women who really fought for the reproductive health law in the Philippines, which is law but is not necessarily enacted. But she that's she's how I learned and what journalism is. She's not the only journalist in my family. Her side of the family are actually mostly journalists, other than my mom, who's a columnist, used to be the the editor of the opinion pages of the inquirer. She was also she was also the she wrote the editorials even after she had retired from the paper because that was her severance package, and I was like, that's not retirement, that's still working. So my mom was a journalist, my her eldest cousin was the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Basically, the inquirer is like the family newspaper. If we don't own it, a rich family owns it. It's just that my family has somehow been in the paper. I never I worked for it when I was a teenager in college. But yeah, my my mom's cousin, my mom's cousin-in-law is still a reporter, she's a Metro reporter. Another cousin of my mother was like an entertainment journalist. Her daughter is now an entertainment journalist as well. Yeah, so long line of journalists. And my dad is an artist. Um, he used to be, he used to be a art director for San Miguel Corporation, which is the largest conglomerate, I think by now. No, not in Asia, at least in Southeast Asia. So he was the guy who was making their annual reports, the calendars. And so he he did that for quite a while, and then he transitioned to magazine work. So he was a creative director for a food magazine, and now he is home, bored out of his mind because he doesn't have my mom to take care of. He he doesn't have a job anymore, and so yeah.
Dave Reddy:Well, he's not really digging at retirement. Maybe you should get him to move to New York and live with you.
Emilia David:He doesn't even want to visit me to New York, yeah. He has a thing about flying, he doesn't want light in the long haul. Uh I understand. Yeah. So uh honestly, I I come from like a family of basically communicators. My dad's official communicator, my mom is a journalist, so that's how it kind of grew up, yeah.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, you you guys must have amazing family stories. Your mother sounds like she left behind a wonderful legacy, including you.
Emilia David:Honest can look her up. Right, she's always got her own Wikipedia page, right? I mean, Wikipedia page. What's your most word again? Rena Jimenez David. Sorry, I'm trying to say in the Filipino way, but Rena Jimenez David. So I yeah, there was a ton written about her. She was in the news, like when she died. A couple of like the evening news people called me, and it was such a weird experience of like this is how like I always joke that my mother is semi-famous. That's sure it is. Yeah, yeah. So it was like it was so weird fielding calls from like reporters, and I was like, wow, this is so odd.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, being on the other end of it, right? Yeah, yeah.
Emilia David:It was, and I actually even helped like a reporter being like, I can this is the question you should be asking me about this. Yeah.
Dave Reddy:This is what you want to know about my mom. Very good. So uh well, I'm interested. I mean, I mean, obviously, a very artistic family, a journalistic family, and your mom, of course, sounds like she was quite the powerhouse. I'm very intrigued. You know, in America, we tend to think only about America and American reproductive rights, which is his own issue.
Emilia David:Yeah.
Dave Reddy:But you grew up in a majority Catholic country, I think it's about 80% Catholic over in the Philippines.
Emilia David:90% Catholic.
Dave Reddy:90% Catholic. So there you go. So the only I've done a I'm uh I'm I'm half Irish Catholic, half German Jewish, so I've done a lot of reading about reproductive rights and other history in Ireland. And I know that in Ireland it was a mess. I would presume it was equally difficult. So talk to me about how your mom, I mean, she that must not have been a popular stance.
Emilia David:It's it's one thing that's very interesting, is that my mom and my dad met in a Catholic university, the oldest Catholic university in Asia, in fact. Actually, it's the oldest university in Asia, point blank. But because they grew up, they were going to college during martial law, there was a lot of focus on activism. And that's how my parents and their cohort really became a voice. And one of the interesting things is my mom is actually or was actually fairly religious in a way that I am not. It was ingrained in her by my grandmother and my great-grandmother, and just generally culture and how she grew up, but she also understood that there are some unalienable rights, and uh it what is interesting is that when she first started writing about women's rights around the time that I was being born, so this is around the people power revolution, it wasn't very popular. She was talking about like the difficulties of being pregnant and working as a woman. And over time that perception really changed. And by the time the reproductive health law was had come about, there was more acceptance in the public. There was not a lot of acceptance in the authority, meaning that my mother was threatened with excommunication and by the Pope himself or by a bishop. By the Pope, by the by by some of the Catholic leaders in the Philippines.
Dave Reddy:It's just very so she definitely faced a little bit of pushback.
Emilia David:Yeah, which is again is also very interesting because my like her younger brother is a priest, but because her younger brother is. It's part of but it's it's part of a more liberal faction of the Catholic faith. There's a lot of uh there's actually a lot of very cat liberal factions in the Catholic faith. The the current Pope is one. There was you know the she maintained a good support system within the within the church, but yeah, there's a lot of government officials who didn't like it. There's a lot of like religious officials who didn't like that fact, but the law passed. It's not when they say it's not entirely enacted, it's there are a lot of provisions in it that require a lot of government support, be as mostly things around providing like providing condoms and birth control pills. Partly it was USAID funded, which is an issue now. It's an issue now. And honestly, I think the government just doesn't want to have to deal with all of that. Yeah, but it it it is it is a law, but there it's there's a long way to go. The Philippines is the only country other than the Vatican that doesn't allow divorce, so long way to go.
Dave Reddy:I did not know that. Yeah, that was the case in Ireland until late into the 20th century.
Emilia David:That's yeah, but um honestly because of that, like I I learned a lot about like about activism and how reporters can be using their voice. Not that I use it here as much, tenuous immigration status and everything, but yeah.
Dave Reddy:So that is an amazing opening story, maybe the most amazing opening story we've had. So I'm gonna take a breath there. And there's no segue here. How how did you end up in New York a few years ago at uh the City University of New York?
Emilia David:Yeah, I wanted to go to grad school. Um I really wanted to go to a grad school abroad, mainly because I worked with a lot of I'd been a reporter in the Philippines for five years. So any school that I go to in Manila, I would be, I would have had a colleague. So it didn't feel like what would I learn exactly? And this was around so this was 2013 and digital media was just really starting to take hold. This was the heyday of you know the the Buzzfeeds and Huffpos and all of that. So I knew I wanted to tap into this emerging space, which wasn't really big yet in the Philippines. It is now, but at that time, I I think we only had really had one purely digital publication, and that was Rappler, but the legacy media companies were also starting to come out with their own website, but they still were kind of more multimedia. They would have an online version, but there's also the print version and the TV version of the news. But so I was trying to see what is interesting about this and how can I learn this. And the idea was to bring it back. So I wanted to go to grad school abroad to learn from people who I don't work with. Because like I like if especially because like if I knew them, if I worked with them in the same newspaper, that doesn't feel like I'm learning anything that she also don't know. So I applied to several grad schools and eventually chose CUNY. Now it's called the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the same time.
Dave Reddy:And who accidentally ruined journalism?
Emilia David:Oh, oh no, yeah. But it it was it was very interesting because I was very drawn to the practical skills that CUNY continues to offer. It wasn't a lot of it wasn't a lot of like, here's the theory of journalism. We were doing a lot of underground stuff because it is the City University of New York. I learned a lot about how New York government works because I had to or doesn't, but like I had to, I had a beat in grad school, and my beat was Community Board 11 in Harlem, which is from like 95th Street until 125th, I believe. I can't remember now exact details, but I went to the community board meetings, I knew elected officials, I learned about how liquor licenses, parking licenses, a lot of the things that permit the day-to-day business of New York City goes on. And that's why during the mayoral election, I understood a lot about it because I also like I knew what how the city works. And that was really interesting, that was really a good way of not just introducing myself to my new city, but also pretty much a crash course in kind of field journalism in the US. But so it was a it was a very good practical grounding. Um and we did a lot of multimedia stuff, so I don't use it very often, but I still know how to edit a video, I know how to edit audio. I I did mostly data journalism. Once in a while I get to do I get to use it. But yeah, it was a I I loved it, but it was like I really wanted to go somewhere where I knew I could learn.
Dave Reddy:How did this go over? You've already explained how it went over with dad. How did this go over with mom and the rest of the journalists in the family into the Philippines?
Emilia David:I mean they my both my parents were very, very supportive of me going to grad school. They they also wanted to go to grad school in New York, but it was not, you know, they were just starting a family. There weren't a lot of scholarships then, like back into the 70s, 80s, in the way that there is now, because there's a I got a scholarship from the Bloomberg Philanthropies. They are they I think they still are big donors to the to CUNY, so there just wasn't a lot of opportunities for them. So they were very excited for me to take this opportunity. They did think I would come back in a year, and that was the plan. And my my parents never truly accepted that, especially because I am now a green card holder, so I'm a permanent resident here in the US, which kind of cements the oh no, she's not going home, is she situation. But they understand that I this is where my career is, so they accept that. Well, they don't accept it, they tolerate it.
Dave Reddy:Fair enough. Just I wanted to quickly put two and two together. Around what time did your parents meet and get married?
Emilia David:They got married in 1978. My brother, my older brother was born in 79.
Dave Reddy:Okay, so for those who aren't as old as me or who know Filipino history like you do, this was the eight the 80s and 90s, or at least the early 90s, were quite interesting. I I'm not gonna get into it, but I I would just ask our listeners to look up Amelda Marcos and her shoe collection, and you'll get a sense of what uh the Filipino government was.
Emilia David:In fact, I was born on in 1986, the day the Marcuses fled to Philippines.
Dave Reddy:No way.
Emilia David:My mom she wrote a she wrote a magazine story about this, at Miss Magazine in the Philippines. But on the 25th of February, the day before I was born, she had walked several miles to try and get to the palace, the presidential palace, Malakan Malakaniang Palace, normally where the sitting president resides. There was a mob, of course. So she tried to walk that heavily pregnant with me, which is I always say, the reason I the reason she gave birth to me early. Because there's you shouldn't be walking that much. But yeah.
Dave Reddy:I was about 12 years old when Aquino went back and you know basically got shot as he walked off the plane, which I presume he knew was gonna happen. So that took I mean literal sacrifice. Yeah, the Philippines, and probably and good for you, not necessarily as in the news as it was when I was a kid, but yeah, those were some trying times. And and congratulations to your parents for getting through those and being part of the change as well. You sort of answered this before, but it it it sounds like the Filipino journalism community is more like the American or Western European journalism community than it would be like some more traditional Asian places like Japan or China where it's it's much more controlled or relaxed.
Emilia David:Yeah, I mean, so it is there is a lot of free press in the Philippines. A lot of it is because of several years of American occupation in the Philippines. So there's it's okay, we got education.
Dave Reddy:Look at the bright side.
Emilia David:Look at the bright side. I mean 300 years of Spanish rule, and we we barely got a lot of it. So but there is um there is a lot of like free press, and there's a big there used to be a much bigger tabloid culture in the Philippines, not not so much anymore. There is a lot of that more Western idea of what journalism is. It isn't exactly the same. There's a lot of differences. So a couple of things. First, in like how news is written, this was something that I had to really learn when they moved here. In the Philippines, the way you write a news story is very straightforward, very not a lot of liberties taken in your prose.
Dave Reddy:More wire style, AP or Bloomberg, perhaps.
Emilia David:Yes, exactly. There would be background that is like weaved in, sure, but it's not it's it's not poetic. There's not a lot of editorial license, and that's because that's exactly how the readership likes it. They want to be told immediately what the news is and how they should be thinking about something that's happening instead of pressing for an opinion, which is very different here in the US. There is always that bent or that slant. There is still a bent and a slant in the Philippines. It's just harder to find. And you will find it usually in the types of stories that are being covered, the types of sources that are being put in and quoted in the news stories. Here in the US, it is so much easier to editorialize and fortunate. Like for good or bad, it does make for some really good reading. And I had to really learn, and I'm still learning to put my voice in. Because that's not something I'm very used to. If I'm writing a straight news story, I'm not used to, you know, having an having a personality and writing about it. So that is something that I've I've taken years to really get to a point where there you can tell it's me that's writing. So that's one difference. The other difference is there's more here in the US, journalists are friends. Like I most of my friends are journalists, but we also work very individually and and separately. In the Philippines, you are competitive. Yeah, so in the Philippines, we are also all competitors, but we move as a pack. And uh we all worked in the same press room. Like you know how in courtrooms and police police beats there are press rooms. That was the way it was in every beat in the Philippines. I was working for Business World, which is a business newspaper, and I had several beats there, and each of my beats, whether it was covering the elections, the labor department, the energy department, telecommunications, or trade, I was always part of a group of other reporters, and we would be, we would have like press rooms where we would all gather. It was easier to kind of discuss what stories we would be covering, which officials we would all try to talk to all at the same time. So it was harder to tend to stand out and work independently because there's this very, very hard to get scoops. One, because if you got a scoop outside of the group, there's always the why didn't you tell us this was happening side of it? But there's also the side of you, it was very hard to break away from the pack because the sources themselves would be like, Well, why am I only talking to you? I want to talk to everyone because we want the most amount of like attention to this.
Dave Reddy:That is very different, yeah.
Emilia David:So that it's it's it's very different. So it's not so much the oh, there's like news and everyone covers it. It's also we're following along kind of the same stories because we all move together as a pack. And when you do have some scoop, you know, people are happy for you, but there's also that increased level of competition. And here in the US, we're all competitors, we all understand that, but because we're not together all the time, it weirdly leads itself to more camaraderie. Like all all of all of my old colleagues in the Philippines, still my friends, still extremely close to them. But it is very different here because I don't I don't have to kind of think of a scoop as something that I am keeping from anyone. It just happens because I don't work with anyone beside me. Yeah.
Dave Reddy:So talk to me about you, you you've bounced around a lot, which is very common these days. Where did you learn the most in terms of both that style of journalism? And you talked about your own voice. And if that's Venture Beat, we can certainly start talking about that uh where you currently work. But where do you feel like you you started getting your own voice and the notion of being competitive and getting getting scoops? Where'd you learn that?
Emilia David:The voice writing, I definitely got it from Insider and The Verge, especially The Verge. It's with the types, with those types of publications, there's an inherent perception of the type of person who writes for them and the type of audience who reads them. So it was kind of easier to slot into that voice as opposed to something that's more like enterprisey, where you have to find that balance of how much of yourself and how much of the company should you be talking about or like being respectful of. So, in terms of voice, it was really writing for Insider and The Verge, and I think especially The Verge. It's like I look back in a lot of the things that I wrote for The Verge, and it was the most voicey I'd ever been. It was the good way. It's the it's the type of like the headline would be very, like, very personality based. And it's just that type of website. And you you see it a lot in right now in the website. It you know, very serious and very expert talk about technology, but you can also tell who wrote it, and that was like a very good way for me to really learn how to do that. And the same kind of goes for Insider because it was more conversational. I had to learn to write as if I was having a conversation and not just dictating information. So that was like a lot of a lot of where I learned that from.
Dave Reddy:But in terms of Who's the editor that was pushing you on that? Because I know I have an editor, Neil Greenberger, who my God taught me how to painfully for him.
Emilia David:Honestly, he's no longer in journalism, but Matt Weinberger uh insider was extremely, extremely helpful in helping me develop my voice in writing. I was sitting in the tech analysis desk, and it was really a lot of looking at what was happening in tech news and understanding what was going on. And that was not something that me, when I first started in journalism, would have been able to really write. And honestly, Adw Robertson in At the Verge, extremely, extremely helpful, really pushing me on that. So, you know, it's it's it's actually all of them, all of the editors that I've had in both news in both news organizations have been really great in kind of helping move along in that direction. In terms of like the things that I do most now, which is looking at a news story and figuring out angles around that, that was something I learned from Waters Technology because that was the job. I was there for about like four years. That was the job, is like talking about capital markets technology and making that interesting and extrapolating a trend to it. And that was also the first place where I started writing about AI. And I swear that if I hadn't started then, I wouldn't be at Venture Beat now able to talk to an engineer and understand their language and extrapolate what they mean in the technical sense to a trend that is going on with enterprise technology.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, you know, my my my first gig, like like many folks who came up in sports, which I did, my first gig was covering high school sports. And you know, there's a hundred high school football games any given night in the metropolitan area. And I just remember Neil beating into me next time, because the story wouldn't be good enough. He said, next time, explain to me why you're there. And I I just at 20 years old, I didn't get what he meant. What he meant, of course, was why are you there instead of the other 99 football games? Why why why does this one matter? And it's not about who scored the most touchdowns, it's you know, it's about who we're looking at, what's going on, and things along those lines. And it sounds like at Waters, you might have had that same thing because there probably were a lot of different things you could have covered, but why were you covering that thing?
Emilia David:Yeah. Honestly, what was very interesting with like with Waters was learning what enterprises cared about, which was not something I tended to think about. So now I like enterprise technology a lot more than more consumer technology because I just don't, I don't kind of don't see the point of it often. Yeah.
Dave Reddy:It's harder to explain. Yeah. I've been doing it my whole career. I don't know, you know, so God bless us. So let's talk about Venture Beat. It's it's a title that has changed a lot. Michael and I talked when he was on the on the on the show that the the title doesn't really fit what you do anymore, but it's it's there. You can't really change the brand. You left The Verge in summer 2024, so last year, to work with Michael and Venture Beat. What led to that change? What was attractive to you about Venture Beat and the role you fill now?
Emilia David:So I had a contract at The Verge. I knew it was always going to end, but in the time that I was there, I was also trying to think of like where do I want to go next? Like what kind of what kind of job did I want to have? And I knew I wasn't done writing about AI, but I also wanted to write about AI a little differently. I I do like writing about policy and I think it's very important, but I also could see that a lot of where the technology could really flourish was not in consumer goods and not consumer products. It was in the enterprise. And that was not something that I was writing a lot about at the verge because it's not an enterprise website, it's a consumer-focused website.
Dave Reddy:A damn good one, but consumer nonetheless.
Emilia David:Yeah. So I was like, I want to talk about, I had this theory that has proven true that generative AI was patterning cloud technology. And I wanted to really look at that. I couldn't do that where I was, and I knew that if I had applied to a lot of the other positions that were out there, that's probably not something that would be to focus. So when I saw that there was an opening at VentureBeat and I knew the types of stories that they were looking for, I was interested. It's like I want to do this, I want to keep writing about the space where I think this technology that is very interesting could flourish or fail, but this is where the innovation would be. It is not going to be the types of like voice agents you and I would be using. It's no, it's in the type of agents that an enterprise, a business is going to use. And it wanted to explore that a lot more. So that's what attracted me a lot to this job. And I wanted to really explore that area, which is why my beat is orchestration, is applied AI. It's not so not just the model, but it's how the model is brought to the the user and how and how that kind of orchestrates down. Yeah.
Dave Reddy:Can you explain that a little bit more? Even though my audience does tend to skew B2B, because we are about the B2B tech top 200, but yeah. Explain orchestration a little bit more and why that's important. You know, when the headlines are OpenAI just got another, you know, invested another cajillion dollars in a company. What what is it about orch orchestration that's so important?
Emilia David:So in the in the very the very base sense, orchestration is how you get from point A to point B. Point A being a model, point B being the application. So how do you get from you have a model, you have to make that fit into the application. So you have to know how that model will then parse that data, will then understand that data, go through all those different points that answers the queries coming from the application. So you need to manage, you need to manage an AI agent, you need to manage all of your different AI applications. And they all have to work together into one stack so that they're not just doing everything and anything, that you can able to control them. So that's the very base layer of what AI orchestration is. It's the ability to manage and control a lot of what's going on between the model and the application so that the business doesn't accidentally launch nuclear codes or something.
Dave Reddy:So well, that sounds important.
Emilia David:Yeah, like it's it's one of those things where you've actually always like every business have been using orchestration, just maybe not AI orchestration. Right. This is how you this is how a lot of different software work together. The difference with AI orchestration is that there's kind of a lot more steps to it, but there's also built into it into it the observability factor of knowing the performance of how your applications and your agents are doing. So that's very important. So that's what orchestration for us is.
Dave Reddy:You know, given that, I'm curious, particularly, I mean, you're you're you're deep into how to get from, as you said, from A to B. And as with any boom, I'm not gonna say bubble, because God help us, but as with any boom, sometimes people focus on A and not so much on B. How do you feel about this boom? I mean, are people genuinely making sure that what they're doing with AI just isn't, you know, bells and whistles, but actually does something?
Emilia David:It's very easy to think of generative AI or just enterprise AI in general as being one thing, but it actually isn't. The boom that you're seeing, that's in one area. That's in the pursuit of AGI, whatever AGI means to different companies, because they do mean different things to different companies. There is a race there that is very hard to quantify. What Venture Beat and I am more concerned of around is the actual practical use cases that we are now seeing come up from this hype. And there are some of those, but these are also technologies that have evolved from traditional machine learning, traditional like algorithmic matching, but these are more evolved versions of that, and these were always technologies that enterprises were going to latch onto because these were things that are very efficient for them. A lot of the superfluous things of it can be ambient and it does do things for you without a lot of prompting, those are nice to have. And we will we will get there eventually. But that is where the attention of a lot of stakeholders and a lot of fundraising tend to be, but the quiet infrastructure work that is still going on and is kind of you know being funded as from osmosis, essentially, that's what we're focused on because that's what companies really are getting to see a lot of value in. We're still not sure what the real ROI is, it's still it tends to be a little early. But conversations with a lot of companies, we're seeing at least a time gain. But the actual like money return on investment, probably we're probably not gonna see that for a while. But you know, if if if the organization values time savings and efficiency more, then who am I to say that's not ROI? So, you know, there there are things that you can clearly see is working, it but like a lot of the attention tends to be taken over by you know the more dreamy, high fruit, like very high-reaching apple thing that's out there.
Dave Reddy:Well, that and the controversy. So let's talk a little bit about that, because if anything's gonna derail something that's hypey, other than the fact that it just doesn't work, which it seems to be you seem to believe it it does or should, it's controversy. So is this a force for good? Is it a force for evil? Is it both?
Emilia David:It's both. One of the reasons why I say I don't see a lot of innovation for consumers is because there's no point in consumers to be using AI. This is controversial.
Dave Reddy:That is, uh keep going.
Emilia David:I one day I will find a use for an AI agent, but because the real world, real life isn't orchestrated in a way an enterprise workflow is, I can't book a yoga class through an AI agent because my yoga studio or the software that my yoga studio uses is not vertically integrated into or doesn't have an API that would connect itself to Chat GP. That's not, it's the least of their problems. Like the first problem that they have to fix is, you know, sometimes it's terrible to book a class.
Dave Reddy:Right.
Emilia David:That's the number one problem that they have to do. There's a lot of there's still a lot of real life things that don't really need AI for. I, for example, would rather call my doctor directly to book, like to go explain why you need an appointment instead of explaining it to an AI agent. The AI agent taps the AI agent of my doctor's clinic who then explains it to my doctor. That's just a lot more steps.
Dave Reddy:I I am really glad to hear you say that because you're way younger than me, and and and that that I just thought. That was the I thought that because I was I'm an old man. But what that is, I appreciate that. Let's talk about something a little bit different than your beat, but it's certainly getting a lot of headlines, not just the infrastructure wars, but the use of AI in the creative world and the ability. So, you know, last month the Screen Actors Guild, you know, announced that it it had made a deal uh with OpenAI, I think it was, or in general, about the proper use of AI in Hollywood. Martin Luther King's family uh managed to get OpenAI and others to stop having users use his image in Sora 2. When it comes to this issue, can the industry police itself or are we looking at more government regulation?
Emilia David:The the the difficulty here is there has to be willingness on both sides to self-regulate or self-police. I disclaimer, VentureBeat uses Mid Journey to generate photo like photos and illustrations for our for our stories. So there is already that like aspect of you know, where did Midjourney get a lot of you know the the art aspect of like where can could it train? So there is that copyright issue, yes. There's also the deep fake issue, which is a separate matter altogether, yes, that is a problem, but um, I think the difficulty is trying to separate the eventual consequence of using AI for art and the how it came about. So those are like two different things, and in the middle of all of this is the innovation part. I get why a lot of industry groups are trying to at least kind of make deals that they feel would protect their constituents because at least they can control the narrative, but that's not enough because that's not self-policing, that's not also controlling the narrative, that's just adding your voice in hopefully the company would listen to you because it's not it's just a partnership, it's not as if you're Microsoft that can dictate to open AI. So there needs to be a larger kind of coalition that would not just involve like the Screen Actors Guild or the Writers Guild, it should also involve the studios, it should also involve a lot of just even just like politicians. There has to be there has to be an agreement from a lot of the stakeholders on what needs to be protected and what needs to be allowed for using AI in the creative sense. So you need to understand the well, it's been trained, so what are we going to do now with the copyright infringement that may have gotten into that? Whether we can't necessarily retroactively punish companies to do that. Okay, great. So now the other consequence, the consequence of like the deep fakes, of maybe people losing their jobs, that's a thing that that could still be regulated. But there needs to be agreement on what we value more for that thing. Do we value the innovation? Do we value the artistic integrity of artists, or do we value the privacy protection of people? And the problem is everything gets conflated in this conversation, but it gets conflated when everyone is not on the same table, and we don't have administrations, unless they're California and Texas and Nashville, that are very interested in protecting and regulating some aspects of the technology. But that's also that's also like there needs to be a constant conversation.
Dave Reddy:That's fascinating. At the end of the day, it's um AI may be new-ish, but this is uh a fundamental issue of liberty versus privacy, which constantly comes up in all sorts of ways.
Emilia David:Yes, yeah.
Dave Reddy:You mentioned that you use Midjourney. I I've again I've spoken with Michael several times. He is very bullish about AI. He even told me that if his folks aren't using AI, he gets upset. So I uh I asked this question of every reporter, but it's a little different asking you. How are you using AI and how are you not?
Emilia David:I have so I I joke about this. I'm very lazy in which platforms I choose. I use ChatGPT because it's installed in my laptop, but also it's the one that I've used the longest. So it's the one I've trained the most. I have a custom GPT that's trained that is basically the persona that I am writing for. So I plugged in the the like the types of readers and audience that Venture Beat that's looking for, and I use it to soundboard stories. I use it a lot to summarize research papers. So I plug in a research paper, ask for a summary, and also ask for would this be interesting to a Venture Beat reader? And I kind of go back and forth with it. So it's been a really helpful guide because I at least come to the table when I'm talking to my editors with a base sense of this is why I think and this would work for us. And and when they come back with like feedback, I also feed it in, and so it has the memory of okay, this is the feedback, this is what we learned before. How can we make this pitch stronger? How can we make this headline like just a little bit better? And then I edit that before submitting. Like I rewrite it, it's basically what I use to soundboard and to gut check what I think is an interesting idea to see that okay, it does map to what I think would be a good VentureBeat reader. Then I bring it to my editors and they say yes or no. So that's been really, really helpful. And honestly, I used to take about an hour and a half just to read a research paper, not even to understand it. It takes me 30 minutes, and I can finish a research paper story for the day, and I have some time left to do something else.
Dave Reddy:But it's more time for enterprise writing and things like that.
Emilia David:And also, I would be remiss to say I still use otter and I I love using otter. It's been very, very helpful in a lot of these more technical conversations that I have. I continue to try a lot of different transcription programs. I have read AI, I have scroll. So I'm constantly trying to experiment with all of that. But I think that's the best thing that's come out of AI is transcription.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, well, I I gotta tell you, that was the first thing I started using when it came when it came to AI for ChatGPT. And oh my God, right? I mean, I I can't tell you back in the day when I was a reporter how many quotes I blew because I was just writing writing stuff down and I couldn't read my own handwriting. It's kind of embarrassing. But uh, I don't think I could fix that, but at least I could just record it and not worry about it. Well, this has been an extraordinarily thoughtful conversation, one of the most thoughtful we've had on the show. But now I'm gonna go back to my favorite fun last question. New York City or the Philippines?
Emilia David:New York. I love the Philippines. If I do decide to start a family, I would definitely move back. I am not raising a child in the US. But New York, it's I'm too neurotic to live anywhere else.
Dave Reddy:Wow. I I I that's that that's new. That New York, uh well, I guess the we what you're saying is you fit in with the rest of the New Yorkers all the time.
Emilia David:I I someone mentioned this. I was watching a Twitch stream the other day, and someone had mentioned people actually have different times within them. And my time, my pace is New York fast. And I anywhere else that isn't as fast is very difficult for me to adapt. So, you know, New York was.
Dave Reddy:I've been to a lot of places. I've been to a reasonable amount of places around this world, and uh New York's about as fast as it gets. So you are in the right place. Emilia, that was wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your your deep thinking about AI. And just want to credit you, congratulate you for continuing your mother's and your family's legacy in journalism. And best of luck to you as you continue what's already been a fantastic career.
Emilia David:All right. Thanks so much.
Dave Reddy:Thanks for being on. I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And once again, a big thank you to Emilia David of Venture Beat. Please don't forget to join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we identified the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready at bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E-D-D-Y at Bigvalley, all one word dot co. No am. You can also email the whole team at pressingmatters at bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening. And as always, think big.
