What the top podcasts are saying about Open-weight models.
Open-weight models came up in 22 of 157 episodes (14%) in the four weeks to Nov 8, about the same share as in the earlier weeks (16%).
Share of episodes, four weeks at a time
The 22 episodes behind the newest bar
- Never Doubted, Back Up, Jobs Boom, Hedge Funds Explode, Cybertruck ScrappedTBPN · week ending Nov 8 · said it 5 times
- Building Legal Agents When You Can't See the Data — Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of LegoraLatent Space · week ending Nov 8 · said it 3 times
- Deep Dive: Anthropic S-1 Myths and Mythos — Jamin Ball, AltimeterLatent Space · week ending Nov 8 · said it 3 times
- Reading the Anthropic S-1, with Zvi MowshowitzComplex Systems · week ending Nov 8 · said it 5 times
- Modal CEO: Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Nov 8 · said it 8 times
- Technology Is Back, Gavin Baker Live, Math Solved Again, Anduril Laptop, DoorDash + Insta…TBPN · week ending Nov 1 · said it 3 times
- $ANT, Yasmin 🐐, Sneaky Qwen, Samsung Controversy, IGTVTBPN · week ending Nov 1 · said it 17 times
- What Wall Street Really Thinks About the AI Trade NowOdd Lots · week ending Nov 1 · said it 7 times
- WHOOP CEO, Will Ahmed: 50B Hours of Health Data, a 4 Million Member Data Moat, & the FDA…All-In Podcast · week ending Nov 1 · said it twice
- Satya Nadella: Whether to Trust Frontier Models | Why Companies Need to Own Their Own Int…20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Nov 1 · said it 5 times
- Instinct Worth 30BN? | Microsoft Cuts 27,000 Jobs While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95B…20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Nov 1 · said it 6 times
- Don Wilson on the GPU Market's Trillion Dollar QuestionOdd Lots · week ending Oct 25 · said it 3 times
- The New Apex Predator: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Adversaries Armed With AI AgentsNo Priors · week ending Oct 25 · said it twice
- Why AI Compute Comes in Rectangles — Erik Bernhardsson, ModalLatent Space · week ending Oct 25 · said it 6 times
- Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & Sa…All-In Podcast · week ending Oct 25 · said it 7 times
- AI Cyber Panic, Ken Griffin’s Bubble Warning, The Fall of France?All-In Podcast · week ending Oct 25 · said it 4 times
- The New VC Game | CoreWeave Sell-Off Creates Panic | Revenue Multiples Out of Control20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Oct 25 · said it 3 times
- SELL EVERYTHING (Including Your Dollars), PPI God Candle, Lee Jae Myung Says "We Must Liv…TBPN · week ending Oct 18 · said it 8 times
- High Taste Testers: The AI Tools We Keep Coming Back ToLatent Space · week ending Oct 18 · said it twice
- CoreWeave Crash, AI Trade Cracks, Anthropic IPO Red Flags, Bill Gates DoomerAll-In Podcast · week ending Oct 18 · said it 3 times
- Valar Atomics Sues Day One Ventures | Meta's Back to the AI Frontier | NVIDIA's $30B Refl…20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Oct 18 · said it 6 times
- The Future of Inference Market & Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value? | LangC…20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Oct 18 · said it 5 times
What the shows said about Open-weight models
Key takeaways from our write-ups that name it, newest first, no more than two from one show. Each links to the full write-up.
Lorenzo Sani self-hosts open-weight language-vision models to run domestic agents without sending sensitive household execution trajectories to closed-source cloud APIs.
Lorenzo Sani Runs Open-Weight Vision Models at Home for Privacy · Practical AI · week ending Nov 15Chinese open-weight models introduce severe supply and security risks, making them unsuitable for Western enterprise backbones.
Arthur Mensch on Why Sovereign AI Is an Economic Necessity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Nov 15Thinking Machines' open-source Inkling 2 model beat Nvidia Nemotron, finishing as the top American open-source model and second globally behind Kimi.
Deep Finance Shows Coding Models Fail at Private Equity Deals · TBPN · week ending Nov 8Open-weight models distilled from American frontier models distribute automated cyber warfare tools globally with no kill switch.
AI Labs Face Blame for Distilled Cyber Weapons · Complex Systems · week ending Nov 8CTO Jacob Lauritzen avoided fine-tuning general models for years, waiting until open weights models matured enough to win on narrow tasks by beating frontier models on cost and latency.
Why Legora Put Its Whole Stack on Azure to Sell to Law Firms · Latent Space · week ending Nov 8Jason Lemkin claims open-source model inference peaked because frontier closed providers cut their API prices.
Erik Bernhardsson Says Open-Source AI Inference Has Not Peaked · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Nov 8Open-weight AI models grew from roughly 20% to nearly 80% market share, taking volume straight from proprietary frontier providers.
Alexander Altmann: Open-Weight Models Now Hold 80% Market Share · Odd Lots · week ending Nov 1Commercial application developers will increasingly default to Chinese open-source models as frontier proprietary models become priced out of standard enterprise software budgets.
Will Manidis on Sovereign AI and the Neo-Dollar · TBPN · week ending Nov 1Frontier cloud API calls cost $20 to $50 per million tokens, while running optimized open-weight models on private GPUs drops the bill to $1 to $2 per million tokens.
Why Enterprise AI Is Moving to Open-Weight Models · All-In Podcast · week ending Oct 25Teams are moving sensitive exploit research to self-hosted open-weight architectures, specifically Chinese models like Qwen and GLM, to maintain autonomy over model responses.
Spencer McIntyre on Why Security Pros Are Quitting Frontier AI · Practical AI · week ending Oct 25
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…”
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…”
Anthropic’s $30B Ramp, Mythos Doomsday, OpenClaw Ankled, Iran War Ceasefire, Israel's Inf…
“I'm coming here as we just shipped Gemma 4. It's a really good open-source model. The Chinese models are very good, but I think outside of China,…”
“…you have all these great options available from closed source to open source models. the open source models…”
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…”
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…”
The Agent Cloud: Databricks’ Bet on the Future of AI — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin
Most recent mentions
The newest episodes that count toward the chart, no more than two from one show.
“…five billion at 40. Incredibly impressive. Uh some of the open source models have been really good. I heard…”
Never Doubted, Back Up, Jobs Boom, Hedge Funds Explode, Cybertruck Scrapped
“Okay. Okay. So, also then on like open source models now are getting really good. So yeah,…”
Building Legal Agents When You Can't See the Data — Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora
“The bear case is essentially that the expectation by many of commoditization. It's the idea that, well, the cheaper, faster, open-weight, you know, competitive models are going to be good enough for whatever you want to do. You will choose to use them instead. If Anthropic's models don't get…”
“…models coming out. Let's also remember like the open source the the open source models they're all moving into licensing…”
Modal CEO: Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute
“…a better technology, and that people are ultimately going to pay for it, and the persistent, I guess, doubt in the market has been, well, you know, open-source models are kind of catching up very quickly, they're worse on their benchmark tests, but not by that much anymore, and they're a lot…”
Which shows say it
| Show | Last four weeks | All weeks counted |
|---|---|---|
| 20VC with Harry Stebbings | 6 | 30 |
| All-In Podcast | 4 | 18 |
| TBPN | 4 | 15 |
| Latent Space | 4 | 13 |
| Odd Lots | 2 | 3 |
| No Priors | 1 | 3 |
| Complex Systems | 1 | 1 |
| Dwarkesh Podcast | 0 | 3 |
| Practical AI | 0 | 2 |
| Cheeky Pint | 0 | 1 |
| Founders Podcast | 0 | 1 |
| How I AI | 0 | 1 |
| Lenny's Podcast | 0 | 1 |
| Lex Fridman Podcast | 0 | 1 |
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 and show promos we can spot. A model marks them in every transcript and our code checks each mark against the words; we also skip 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 March 30, 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.