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Podcasts have become one of the main ways people keep up with artificial intelligence. Researchers, founders, and engineers use the format to air ideas before they reach papers or product launches.
This directory covers the most influential AI and machine learning podcasts: shows focused on research, on the business of AI, on policy and safety, and on building with large language models. The list reflects what working AI practitioners recommend most often.
See also: Guides and Books on AI.
The table below summarises the most cited AI podcasts, their hosts, launch years, and primary focus.
| Podcast | Host(s) | Launched | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lex Fridman Podcast | Lex Fridman | 2018 | Long form interviews covering AI, science, philosophy, and politics |
| The TWIML AI Podcast | Sam Charrington | 2016 | Machine learning research, MLOps, and applied AI |
| Latent Space | swyx (Shawn Wang), Alessio Fanelli | 2023 | The AI engineer perspective, agents, infrastructure, and developer tooling |
| No Priors | Sarah Guo, Elad Gil | 2023 | AI startups, investing, and conversations with founders and researchers |
| The Cognitive Revolution | Nathan Labenz (with Erik Torenberg) | 2023 | AI builders, researchers, and capability analysis |
| Practical AI | Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson | 2018 | Productionising AI and ML, tooling, and real world deployment |
| The Gradient Podcast | Daniel Bashir | 2021 | Deep technical interviews with researchers and academics |
| Hard Fork | Kevin Roose, Casey Newton | 2022 | Tech news with heavy AI coverage, from a journalist perspective |
| Dwarkesh Podcast | Dwarkesh Patel | 2020 | Long, prepared interviews with AI researchers, historians, and economists |
| Last Week in AI | Andrey Kurenkov, Jeremie Harris | 2020 | Weekly news roundup covering research, policy, and industry |
| Machine Learning Street Talk | Tim Scarfe (with Keith Duggar) | 2020 | Technical and philosophical discussions about ML, with researcher guests |
| Eye on AI | Craig S. Smith | 2018 | Biweekly interviews with researchers and industry figures |
| AI + a16z | Derrick Harris and a16z partners | 2024 | Andreessen Horowitz spin off focused on AI builders and infrastructure |
| The AI Daily Brief | Nathaniel Whittemore | 2023 | Daily news analysis and commentary on AI developments |
| Doom Debates | Liron Shapira | 2024 | AI safety and existential risk debates |
The Lex Fridman Podcast is the most widely listened to long form AI show. Lex Fridman, a research scientist who has worked at MIT, started the podcast in 2018 under the name The Artificial Intelligence Podcast. He renamed it in 2020 to reflect the broader range of guests, which by then included physicists, historians, and politicians.
The show is best known for its multi hour conversations with figures such as Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Yann LeCun, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei. Episodes typically run between two and five hours, with little editing. By 2024 the Boston Globe reported the show had passed 3.6 million subscribers, making it one of the largest tech adjacent podcasts in the world.
Sam Charrington launched This Week in Machine Learning & AI in mid 2016, which makes it one of the oldest dedicated ML shows still running. The name was shortened to The TWIML AI Podcast as the field grew. Charrington is an industry analyst, and episodes lean toward practitioners working on applied ML, MLOps, and the engineering side of deep learning rather than purely academic conversations. Guests have included researchers from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and dozens of startups.
The Gradient is a magazine and podcast founded in 2017 by graduate students and researchers at the Stanford AI Lab. The podcast began in 2021, with Daniel Bashir, a machine learning compiler engineer, as the host. Episodes are typically long and dense, with researcher guests walking through their papers, methods, and broader views about where the field is going. Topics often include in context learning, mechanistic interpretability, theoretical neuroscience, and AI policy.
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) began in April 2020. The original hosts were three YouTubers working in ML: Tim Scarfe, Connor Shorten, and Yannic Kilcher. The show is now mainly run by Tim Scarfe, who has a PhD in machine learning, with frequent appearances from Keith Duggar.
MLST is more philosophically inclined than most ML shows. Episodes regularly cover consciousness, the nature of intelligence, symbolic versus connectionist approaches, and debates about whether large language models actually understand anything. Guests have included Gary Marcus, Francois Chollet, Yoshua Bengio, and Karl Friston. Hosts will push back on guest claims, which makes for sharper episodes than the friendly format used by most other shows.
Latent Space, also known as The AI Engineer Podcast, was launched in January 2023 by Alessio Fanelli, a partner at Decibel Partners, and swyx, the pseudonym for Shawn Wang, a developer advocate and writer. The newsletter started earlier in 2022 and the podcast grew out of it.
The show is the closest thing the AI engineer subculture has to a flagship publication. It focuses on the practical questions of building with large language models: agent frameworks, evaluation, fine tuning, inference infrastructure, and shipping AI products. Guests have included founders and engineers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, LangChain, Replicate, and many smaller labs. Latent Space also runs the AI Engineer Summit conference.
No Priors launched in early 2023, hosted by Sarah Guo, founder of the venture firm Conviction, and Elad Gil, a longtime startup investor. The investor lens shapes the content: episodes often discuss market structure, distribution, defensibility, and how AI is reshaping specific industries. Guests have included Sam Altman, Mira Murati, Andrej Karpathy, Reid Hoffman, and many AI startup founders. Guo and Gil also bring researchers on for technical conversations, so the show is broader than a pure business podcast.
The Cognitive Revolution is hosted by Nathan Labenz, an entrepreneur and early tester of frontier models, and Erik Torenberg. The show launched in 2023 and is part of the Turpentine media network. Labenz is unusual among podcast hosts in that he spends large amounts of time using the models he discusses, often as a red teamer, so episodes frequently include detailed walkthroughs of capabilities and failure modes. The show also gives substantial airtime to AI safety and alignment, with guests ranging from capability researchers to people focused on existential risk.
Practical AI launched on 2 July 2018, hosted by Daniel Whitenack, a data scientist, and Chris Benson, who works in AI strategy. It is produced by Changelog Media. The show emphasises practical implementation rather than research frontiers: deploying models in production, tooling, data pipelines, and case studies from companies using AI. The tone is closer to a developer podcast than a research show, and it remains a good entry point for engineers moving into ML from adjacent backgrounds.
AI + a16z is the dedicated AI show in the broader Andreessen Horowitz podcast network. The main a16z Podcast launched in 2014 and covers all of the firm's investment areas. AI + a16z was spun off in 2024 to focus on AI builders, founders, and infrastructure, edited and frequently hosted by Derrick Harris with a16z partners and AI guests rotating through. Episodes cover agent design, inference economics, enterprise AI adoption, and conversations with portfolio founders.
Hard Fork is the New York Times tech podcast, launched in late 2022. The hosts are Kevin Roose, a Times technology columnist, and Casey Newton, who runs the Platformer newsletter. Hard Fork is not exclusively about AI but the topic has dominated its run, especially after Roose's widely shared early 2023 conversation with Microsoft's Bing chatbot. The framing is journalistic: Roose and Newton are more willing than most AI podcast hosts to push back on claims, ask about harms, and zoom out to the social and political picture. For listeners outside the technical core of the field, Hard Fork is often the most accessible entry point.
The AI Daily Brief, originally called The AI Breakdown, started on 4 April 2023, hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore. It is a daily show, which is unusual in the AI podcast space, and runs short episodes summarising recent news, papers, product launches, and policy developments. Whittemore mixes news with analysis, so the show works as an opinionated daily briefing rather than a neutral newsletter in podcast form.
Last Week in AI launched in 2020 and is hosted by Andrey Kurenkov, a Stanford trained AI researcher, with co host Jeremie Harris of Gladstone AI. It is associated with Skynet Today. The show is a weekly news roundup covering research papers, product releases, business news, and policy developments. Episodes tend to run 60 to 90 minutes and include detailed timestamps and links, so listeners can skip to the stories that interest them.
Eye on AI is hosted by Craig S. Smith, a former New York Times correspondent. The show launched in 2018 and runs biweekly. Smith brings a journalist's instinct to the format, with episodes ranging across research, business, and policy. Guests have included Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and a wide selection of researchers and CEOs. It has run consistently since before the current wave of generative AI, giving it a deeper archive than most shows.
The Dwarkesh Podcast, originally called The Lunar Society, is hosted by Dwarkesh Patel. Patel began the show in 2020 while studying computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. It has become one of the most cited interview podcasts in AI, partly because Patel prepares unusually heavily; episodes are often the result of weeks of reading, and guests have publicly noted that he asks questions other interviewers do not get to.
Guests have included Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Tony Blair, Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, and Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken of Anthropic. The show alternates between AI focused episodes and conversations with historians, economists, and policy figures.
Doom Debates launched in mid 2024 and is hosted by Liron Shapira, a startup founder and investor with a long standing concern about AI x risk. The show is built around debates and conversations with people who hold a range of views on whether advanced AI poses an existential threat. Shapira's own position is openly doomer, but he regularly hosts guests who disagree. The format is more confrontational than most AI podcasts: Shapira pushes guests directly on what probability they put on extinction level outcomes and what would change their minds.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast, hosted by Rob Wiblin, is run by the effective altruism aligned career organisation 80,000 Hours. It is not exclusively about AI but has become one of the longest running outlets for in depth conversations about AI safety, alignment research, and AI policy. Episodes are often three or four hours long and include detailed transcripts. Guests have included senior figures from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and academic AI alignment research groups, plus economists and policy experts focused on long term consequences of AI.
Several podcasts that are not exclusively about AI cover the field heavily enough to belong in any AI podcast list.
| Podcast | Host(s) | AI coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Sharp Tech | Andrew Sharp, Ben Thompson | Strategy and business implications of AI, part of Stratechery |
| Dithering | Ben Thompson, John Gruber | Short twice weekly format with frequent AI segments |
| Acquired | Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal | Long episodes on Nvidia, OpenAI, and other AI relevant companies |
| Decoder | Nilay Patel | Regular AI policy and product interviews from The Verge |
| The Ezra Klein Show | Ezra Klein | Periodic AI episodes with researchers and policy figures |
| Possible | Reid Hoffman, Aria Finger | Optimistic AI discussions with researchers and founders |
AI podcasting in 2026 looks very different from the field circa 2018. The earlier shows, including TWIML, Practical AI, and Eye on AI, were mostly aimed at researchers, ML engineers, and curious technologists. The release of GPT-3 in 2020, and especially the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022, reshaped the landscape. Long form interview podcasts like Dwarkesh became a normal stop for senior figures at AI labs, news shows like Hard Fork and The AI Daily Brief carved out daily and weekly audiences, and investor founder shows like No Priors built audiences out of the venture capital ecosystem. Shows have got longer, with three to five hour episodes now routine, and hosts increasingly come from inside the field rather than from journalism.
Which podcast is right depends on what you want from it. For long, prepared interviews with AI researchers, the Dwarkesh Podcast and Lex Fridman Podcast are the standard recommendations. For the engineer perspective on building with current models, Latent Space is the most cited single show. For staying current on news, The AI Daily Brief, Last Week in AI, and Hard Fork cover most of what matters. For deeper research conversations, The Gradient Podcast and Machine Learning Street Talk are the right places to look. For AI safety, Doom Debates and 80,000 Hours cover the field from different angles. Most listeners end up sampling from several rather than committing to one, since no single podcast covers everything that matters in a given month.