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

Hardware attention gained ground while adoption use cases fell back

Across 29 episodes from 13 contributing podcasts, hardware rose 5.6 points to 6.6% while adoption use cases fell 3.7 points to 32.7%.

The TL;DR

What changed
Adoption Use Cases fell 3.7 points and Research fell 3 points.
Where it showed up
Adoption Use Cases, Research, and Safety & governance accounted for 66% of the relevant conversation across 29 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 33% of the conversation across 13 podcasts this week.About the same33% of this week · 13 podcasts
  2. ResearchNew models, training methods, benchmarks, and discoveries from AI labs.Discussion of research stayed near its recent level. It made up 19% of the conversation across 10 podcasts this week.About the same19% of this week · 10 podcasts
  3. 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 14% of the conversation across 10 podcasts this week.About the same14% of this week · 10 podcasts
  4. AgentsAI systems that can plan, use tools, and carry out multi-step tasks.Discussion of agents eased compared with recent weeks. It made up 12% of the conversation across 13 podcasts this week.Losing attention12% of this week · 13 podcasts
Showing 4 of 10 topicsView 6 more topicsShow fewer topics
  1. HardwareThe chips, data centers, energy, and devices that AI depends on.Discussion of hardware grew compared with recent weeks. It made up 7% of the conversation across 6 podcasts this week.Gaining attention7% of this week · 6 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 4% of the conversation across 7 podcasts this week.About the same4% of this week · 7 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 4% of the conversation across 9 podcasts this week.About the same4% of this week · 9 podcasts
  4. InfrastructureThe software and systems needed to build, deploy, and monitor AI.Discussion of infrastructure stayed near its recent level. It made up 3% of the conversation across 10 podcasts this week.About the same3% of this week · 10 podcasts
  5. 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 2% of the conversation across 7 podcasts this week.About the same2% of this week · 7 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 8 podcasts this week.About the same2% of this week · 8 podcasts
Back to all concepts
From Sep 21–27, 2026

About this Concept

Open Models

AI models whose weights or code are available for others to use and adapt.

Trend this week

12 of 12 weeks tracked had mentions across multiple podcasts.

A closer read

What changed
Its share rose from 1.6% to 1.9%, with evidence across 7 podcasts.
Where it showed up
It appeared in episodes including “OpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s ...” and “Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Or...”.
How to read it
6 cited episodes from 5 podcasts are shown below. The topic appeared across 7 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.

13 quoted moments · 6 episodes · 5 podcasts

Latent Space

OpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha

Open episode ↗
  1. C
    “There was no API because they weren't in for people. It's like, okay, download these weights and you guys go figure out how to use them.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  2. C
    “They had run with Stable Diffusion. And with Mistral, uh I don't know if you guys remember, but the first checkpoint they released was like torrents. It was like torrent weights.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment

The Cognitive Revolution

Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

Open episode ↗
  1. A
    “Have you heard any pitches around, like, well, I guess for one thing, how about open weights models? This has obviously been a vexing question. I'm a huge— every chance I get to cite Graham from AE Studio and Anthropic, uh I point to them.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  2. A
    “maybe you could be convinced to use this technique and then distribute the model with like -2 experts or whatever that take out those kind of most dangerous capabilities.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  3. C
    “Is it even possible to impose safety or security onto open weight models even if they're being used by, say, bad actors? It just seems so tough.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment

Latent Space

Runway’s WorldPrompt and the Engineering of Real-Time Worlds

Open episode ↗
  1. B
    “I do think it's important for NVIDIA models. If you look at the leaderboards of video models, I would say right now the majority of models at the uh top 10, top 20 are Chinese models. There is uh only a handful of companies that are made it to the leaderboard from the US or th...”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  2. C
    “Sure. It was just random notes we had. NVIDIA uh launched COSMO. I guess it's interesting. So uh you're a founding member, AI labs to build open source world models in physical AI. Um Anything much to talk on here? Is open research?”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  3. B
    “There's still so much that you can scale those models further. So much more advancements and things that we can figure out how to improve those models further.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment

AI For Humans

Opus 5.5 is our favorite AI model (so far).

Play episode ↗
  1. A
    “Lift the shirt and show your tattoo. Uh, all right. The point is there is a new Grok. Great. Like, we welcome all comers. There's been some hot new open source AI models.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  2. A
    “there's been some uh great open source uh Chinese releases as well. I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
  3. A
    “For the video users, the thumbnail's on the screen. For everybody else, I'll just say that what's beneath the blurry pixels was really incredible considering it's a local model that was uh jailbroken to be fully uncensored. Y'all can make whatever you want now. And maybe we'll...”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment

Last Week in AI

#257 - GPT 6 Astra, AI Extinction, Security Incidents

Play episode ↗
  1. B
    “open source is catching up. But if you actually look at, okay, well, what does OpenAI and Anthropic have in-house right now? The gap widens considerably.”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment

The AI Native Dev

Dexter Horthy: Why We Stopped Trusting AI to Write the Plan

Play episode ↗
  1. A
    “open is catching up faster than anyone is ready to notice yet”

    ConceptOpen Models

    Report this moment
What’s hot this weekBack to all concepts

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 36.4% last week to 32.7% this week, reversing the previous week's rise.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks33.2%This week32.7%

Came up about as often as in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments
Where it came up

Open an episode to hear the surrounding conversation.

  1. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  2. Latent SpaceOpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha
  3. Latent SpaceOpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha
  4. The AI Daily BriefHow People Are Actually Using Jev
  5. The AI Daily BriefHow People Are Actually Using Jev

Research

Changed direction

Research reversed course

Its share fell from 22.1% last week to 19.1% this week, reversing the previous week's rise.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks18.5%This week19.1%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments
Where it came up

Open an episode to hear the surrounding conversation.

  1. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  2. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  3. Machine Learning Street TalkWhen AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang
  4. Machine Learning Street TalkWhen AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang
  5. The Cognitive RevolutionZero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

Hardware

Gaining attention

Hardware gained ground

Its share grew from 1% last week to 6.6% this week.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks2.4%This week6.6%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments
Where it came up

Open an episode to hear the surrounding conversation.

  1. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  2. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  3. AI InsideQualcomm Wants Its AI Chips On Every Device
  4. AI InsideQualcomm Wants Its AI Chips On Every Device
  5. Eye on AIThe Technology for Fully Autonomous Attack Is Already Here | Alex Liannyi, NORDA Dynamics

Agents

Losing attention

Agents cooled

Its share fell from 14.6% last week to 12.4% this week.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks15.8%This week12.4%

Came up less often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments
Where it came up

Open an episode to hear the surrounding conversation.

  1. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  2. Machine Learning Street TalkWhen AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang
  3. Machine Learning Street TalkWhen AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang
  4. Latent SpaceOpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha
  5. The AI Daily BriefAI Agents Are Moving Into the Real World

Safety & governance

Holding steady

Safety & governance held its ground

Its share has stayed near 14% of the conversation for three weeks.

Share of this week’s podcast conversation

Recent weeks13.3%This week14.0%

Came up more often than in recent weeks.

Podcast moments5 cited moments
Where it came up

Open an episode to hear the surrounding conversation.

  1. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  2. The Cognitive RevolutionAI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
  3. The Cognitive RevolutionZero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck
  4. The Cognitive RevolutionZero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck
  5. Last Week in AI#257 - GPT 6 Astra, AI Extinction, Security Incidents

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