Issue No. 40Week ending Sunday, October 4, 2026507 episodes · 2183 articles
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Trend Steady

Open-weight models: how often the top podcasts talk about it.

Open-weight models came up in 14 of 89 episodes (16%) in the four weeks to Sep 27, about the same share as in the earlier weeks (15%).

14 of 89episodes, four weeks to Sep 27

Share of episodes, four weeks at a time

6%May 103 of 524%Jun 72 of 4619%Jul 513 of 6924%Aug 213 of 5518%Aug 3010 of 5516%Sep 2714 of 89
Share of episodes from the tech, business and science shows we cover that said “open weight” or “open source model” at least twice, in blocks of four weeks. Each label is the block's last Sunday. The newest block is the orange bar on the right.
The 14 episodes behind the newest bar

Earliest mentions in our archive

The first episode from each show that said it, oldest first. The matched words are marked.

“…you know, what you're going to see is the open source models are probably one step back from the absolute frontier. Um…”

20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Apr 5 · Watch at 10:50 ↗

Demis Hassabis: Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution & Where Are The Bottlene…

“…engineered is we're now a year later. There's a bunch of open- source models out there that have the same level of…”

All-In Podcast · week ending Apr 5 · Watch at 11:06 ↗

Anthropic’s $30B Ramp, Mythos Doomsday, OpenClaw Ankled, Iran War Ceasefire, Israel's Inf…

“…you have all these great options available from closed source to open source models. the open source models…”

No Priors · week ending May 3 · Watch at 1:07 ↗

Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava on Custom Models, and Building the Inference Cloud

“…interesting like play it out a little bit. China you know these open source models are around eight months behind…”

TBPN · week ending May 10 · Watch at 15:44 ↗

Sam vs Elon Trial, Coinbase Cuts 14% in AI Pivot, Digesting Meta Earnings | Diet TBPN

“Yeah. Yeah. So we uh decided, you know, even though we we did launch a open source model DBRX and you know, we we…”

Latent Space · week ending Jun 28 · Watch at 1:00:05 ↗

The Agent Cloud: Databricks’ Bet on the Future of AI — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin

“…agents pre-logged in in here. And you can also use some of the open source models if you want.”

How I AI · week ending Jul 12 · Watch at 4:57 ↗

How I run autonomous coding agents from my phone with OpenAI Symphony + Linear

Most recent mentions

The newest episodes that count toward the chart, no more than two from one show.

“…this was to my knowledge the first time an open weights model was called that in real seriousness…”

Latent Space · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 46:16 ↗

The $10 Trillion Token Economy — Alex Atallah, OpenRouter & Anjney Midha, AMP

“…which is the Alibaba model, comes out version, you know, 2.1. It's an open weights model that outperforms Nano…”

All-In Podcast · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 20:54 ↗

Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Align…

“…of harness, if you're trying to run Pi or some of the Hermes or whatever, you know what? It's actually like maybe you're going to do better on some open-source models, and a lot of these open-source models coming from China are really great with that. And so there was something that a friend, my…”

Practical AI · week ending Sep 13 · Listen at 36:57 ↗

Computer-Use Agents and the Future of the Agentic Internet

“…have a stamping process that people that get to use the more dangerous models actually themselves meet some security thresholds. And then with open-source models, you have another major challenge because if you look at Bridgewater, one of the most successful things we've done, you talked a…”

Odd Lots · week ending Sep 13 · Listen at 30:55 ↗

Why Bridgewater's CIO Says AI's Human Extinction Risk Is Real

“- Which companies were doing that, the research? - There were some good NVIDIA models, open-source models. - But wait, it's just an independent researcher.”

Founders Podcast · week ending Sep 13 · Watch at 6:21 ↗

Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs

Which shows say it

ShowLast four weeksAll weeks counted
20VC with Harry Stebbings420
Dwarkesh Podcast33
All-In Podcast112
Latent Space18
TBPN17
Founders Podcast11
Lenny's Podcast11
Odd Lots11
Practical AI11
How I AI01
Lex Fridman Podcast01
No Priors01

More trends

Episodes in the newest four weeks:

How we count. An episode counts when its transcript says “open weight” or “open source model” at least twice; plurals count too. We count a shortened re-upload of an episode we already have only once, and we skip the sponsor reads we can spot: the lines around phrases like “brought to you by”, and any passage a show reads word for word in three or more episodes. The share is the counted episodes divided by all episodes from the tech, business and science shows we cover in the same four weeks, so a busy month of releases does not raise it by itself. The mix of shows does change from month to month, and one daily show can move a number. Weeks run Monday to Sunday, and the week in progress is left out until it ends. The chart starts with the week of April 13, 2026, when our archive became steady. A few older episodes can still appear under the earliest mentions, and some weeks have gaps. Transcripts are automatic captions, so we also match the spellings they use. The counts cover only the shows we summarize. Download the counts (JSON) or CSV.

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