The AI conversation, week by week
18 AI-focused podcasts currently tracked18 AI podcasts

Currently tracking18 AI-focused podcasts

  • AI For Humans
  • AI Inside
  • AI Today Podcast
  • Eye on AI
  • Gradient Dissent
  • Interconnects
  • Last Week in AI
  • Latent Space
  • Machine Learning Street Talk
  • Me, Myself, and AI
  • No Priors
  • Practical AI
  • The AI Daily Brief
  • The AI Native Dev
  • The Artificial Intelligence Show
  • The Cognitive Revolution
  • The TWIML AI Podcast
  • Training Data

VAIBE tracks conversations across AI-focused podcasts to show what people are talking about now, and tracks how those conversations change week by week.

This week in AI conversations

Infrastructure attention rebounded while adoption use cases fell back

Across 17 episodes from 11 contributing podcasts, infrastructure rose 3.1 points to 9.3% while adoption use cases fell 3 points to 29.2%.

The TL;DR

What changed
Adoption Use Cases fell 3 points and Agents fell 1.5 points.
Where it showed up
Adoption Use Cases, Agents, and Research accounted for 58% of the relevant conversation across 17 episodes.
How to read it
Recurrence across podcasts does not mean agreement. The cited moments show the language behind each summary.

What’s hot this week

The ideas that came up most often, what changed, and why they mattered. Open any topic to see the podcast moments behind it.

  1. Adoption Use CasesPractical ways people and organizations are putting AI to work.Discussion of adoption use cases stayed near its recent level. It made up 29% of the conversation across 11 podcasts this week.About the same29% of this week · 11 podcasts
  2. AgentsAI systems that can plan, use tools, and carry out multi-step tasks.Discussion of agents grew compared with recent weeks. It made up 16% of the conversation across 10 podcasts this week.Gaining attention16% of this week · 10 podcasts
  3. ResearchNew models, training methods, benchmarks, and discoveries from AI labs.Discussion of research eased compared with recent weeks. It made up 12% of the conversation across 9 podcasts this week.Losing attention12% of this week · 9 podcasts
  4. InfrastructureThe software and systems needed to build, deploy, and monitor AI.Discussion of infrastructure grew compared with recent weeks. It made up 9% of the conversation across 9 podcasts this week.Gaining attention9% of this week · 9 podcasts
Showing 4 of 11 topicsView 7 more topicsShow fewer topics
  1. Safety & governanceWays to reduce harm, set limits, test behavior, and govern how AI is used.Discussion of safety & governance stayed near its recent level. It made up 8% of the conversation across 9 podcasts this week.About the same8% of this week · 9 podcasts
  2. RegulationLaws, rules, and government decisions about how AI may be built and used.Discussion of regulation stayed near its recent level. It made up 7% of the conversation across 5 podcasts this week.About the same7% of this week · 5 podcasts
  3. EconomicsThe cost of building and running AI, and how money moves through the market.Discussion of economics stayed near its recent level. It made up 6% of the conversation across 11 podcasts this week.About the same6% of this week · 11 podcasts
  4. Open ModelsAI models whose weights or code are available for others to use and adapt.Discussion of open models stayed near its recent level. It made up 5% of the conversation across 7 podcasts this week.About the same5% of this week · 7 podcasts
  5. HardwareThe chips, data centers, energy, and devices that AI depends on.Discussion of hardware stayed near its recent level. It made up 3% of the conversation across 4 podcasts this week.About the same3% of this week · 4 podcasts
  6. JobsHow AI is changing work, hiring, roles, and the skills people need.Discussion of jobs stayed near its recent level. It made up 2% of the conversation across 5 podcasts this week.About the same2% of this week · 5 podcasts
  7. OtherAI discussion that does not fit another recurring topic.Discussion of other stayed near its recent level. It made up 2% of the conversation across 6 podcasts this week.About the same2% of this week · 6 podcasts
Back to all concepts
From Jul 13–19, 2026

About this Concept

Agents

AI systems that can plan, use tools, and carry out multi-step tasks.

Trend this week

4 of 4 weeks tracked had mentions across multiple podcasts.

A closer read

What changed
Its share fell from 17.4% to 15.9%, with evidence across 10 podcasts.
Where it showed up
It appeared in episodes including “The Self-Driving Company” and “Kimi K3 Is Here. China Just Hit the AI Frontier.”.
How to read it
6 cited episodes from 5 podcasts are shown below. The topic appeared across 10 podcasts in the full analysis.

Podcast moments from the week

Moments are grouped by episode so repeated excerpts from one conversation do not look like separate sources.

18 quoted moments · 6 episodes · 5 podcasts

The AI Daily Brief

The Self-Driving Company

Open episode ↗
  1. A
    “But it's not just totally new efforts that are seeing the impact of new agentic ways of working. In fact, as cool as some of these brand new startup style experiments are, ultimately their examples can be a little bit hard to see how they apply to today's existing companies, w...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. A
    “It feels like a single master intelligence threaded through every employee, even though it is not. It is an expanding system of agents operating across the company. Taking goals from people, gathering context, performing work, checking the results, and escalating when human ju...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. A
    “They feel like they've been promoted. This is the story of how AI has completely changed the way that we work at Replit. Engineering saw the impact first. In late January, we turned up infrastructure to experiment with internal agent use cases quickly. We leveraged our agent h...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

AI For Humans

Kimi K3 Is Here. China Just Hit the AI Frontier.

Play episode ↗
  1. A
    “Their company's gonna start making long horizon agents for things like a mortgage or things like, hey, apply to your healthcare company. And so you don't have to do those crazy long steps.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. A
    “I mean, I use Claude throughout this process and it's been very helpful, but like, I would love to just give it to you. Go do it.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. B
    “Yes, you have access to all my stuff. You go sort it out.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

Practical AI

The Future of AI Infrastructure with CoreWeave

Open episode ↗
  1. C
    “and then using AI itself to do that, I think, is sort of a clever approach.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. C
    “I think the experience is going to be an interaction with an agent”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. C
    “But based on this data, perhaps it actually would be helpful to go and iterate and iterate and iterate and loop and loop and loop. And so this sort of approach to AI loop, I think, will be that type of development experience. It will still be the brains of the researcher. It w...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

Latent Space

🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center — Andy Beam & Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli, Lila Sciences

Open episode ↗
  1. D
    “So the, the system designs the experiments, it gives instructions. There's like, oh, people need to actually do this thing. So you get— you recruit some of the staff to go and do that thing.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. B
    “Everything's an API call. And so sometimes when you call an API, there's a robot arm. Sometimes there's a, there's a human arm that does it.”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. B
    “Yeah, well, phrasing. I think that, again, we want to spend resources where it makes sense to spend resources and make rational decisions. And sometimes it just doesn't make sense to try and automate a step when a person can do it in a 10th of a second. But what matters is tha...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

AI Inside

Apple Says OpenAI Stole Its Secrets

Play episode ↗
  1. B
    “Like, they released GPT-5.6 with 3— on a more broadly released sense anyways. This is, you know, the 3 flavors that we've talked about: Sol, which is most powerful; Luna, which is faster, it's for speed; Terra, which is like the middle ground or a balance point. And SOL, they ...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. B
    “But that can kind of open Claude's way through all of these different things for you, right? Into your file structure, into all of your important places online as data sources, and become the place that you do all your business. Like I talked last week, that's largely what I u...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. B
    “good testing ground for what an app like that would need to do to have effective agents working in the browser so that it works in like a super app”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

The AI Daily Brief

5 AI Engineering Trends for Non-Engineers

Open episode ↗
  1. A
    “Importantly, and this was not consensus at the time, Swyx wrote, I think it is a full-time job. I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as site reliability engineer, DevOps...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  2. A
    “It's about the harness and broader system that the agent operates in. That includes, yes, access to context and data, but also access to skills, ability to interact with tools, and increasingly, ability to route between different models based on the task at hand. Now, Richard ...”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment
  3. A
    “Richard writes that at the event this year, agents were largely positioned as augmenting the AI engineer rather than replacing them. This was a big part of the substance of the day 2 keynote with OpenAI's Romain Hewitt, who said software ate the world and then AI ate software....”

    ConceptAgents

    Report this moment

Signals to keep watching

Topics whose movement across recent reports may matter beyond this week.

Adoption Use Cases

Changed direction

Adoption Use Cases reversed course

Its share fell from 32.2% last week to 29.2% this week, reversing the previous week's rise.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks30.0%This week29.2%

Came up less often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments

Infrastructure

Changed direction

Infrastructure rebounded

Its share rose from 6.2% last week to 9.3% this week, reversing the previous week's drop.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks5.6%This week9.3%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments

Open Models

Gaining attention

Open Models gained ground

Its share grew from 1.7% last week to 4.6% this week.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks3.1%This week4.6%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments

Jobs

Losing attention

Jobs cooled

Its share fell from 4.7% last week to 2.3% this week.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks3.7%This week2.3%

Came up less often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments

Regulation

Gaining attention

Regulation gained ground

Its share grew from 5% last week to 7.1% this week.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks5.9%This week7.1%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments

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