Barely Possible

[Barely Possible 2026-06-01]

Today's episode:

• Sam Altman launched OpenAI Robotics, led by DALL-E co-creator Aditya Ramesh, hiring full-stack hardware, ops, and ML engineers to...

• OpenAI's near-term target is robots for skilled trades building its own data-center infrastructure, not Tesla-style kitchen humanoids.

• Altman pitched OpenAI into biodefense the same afternoon, with a stated goal to "help the world get a head start" on bio threats.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

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Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-01/podcast-episode-2026-06-01.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-01/2026-06-01-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-31]

Today's episode:

• Bernhard Hauser's May 30 piece argues productized services are back, with AI cutting back-of-house costs so fixed-scope work hits...

• Simon Willison calls token-maxing leaderboards "a stupid idea," worse on enterprise Anthropic/OpenAI plans billed at full API price...

• Granite-4.1-30b lands in the shadow of Qwen3.6 and Gemma4, raising the question of which models are worth your bench time.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_90&feed_source=rss&episode_id=90

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-31/podcast-episode-2026-05-31.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-31/2026-05-31-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-30]

Today's episode:

• Claude Opus 4.8 ships: SWE-bench Pro 64.3→69.2, Terminal-Bench 66.1→74.6, but GPT-5.5 still leads Terminal-Bench at 78.2.

• Anthropic's Series H closes at $965B, more than doubling February's $380B, passing OpenAI on paper with $47B run-rate revenue.

• Bun's Jared Sumner ported Zig to Rust in 11 days via Claude Code sub-agents: 750K lines, 99.8% tests passing, Opus orchestrating.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_89&feed_source=rss&episode_id=89

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-30/podcast-episode-2026-05-30.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-30/2026-05-30-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-29]

Today's episode:

• A r/artificial user claims an 8-day zero-dollar agent on AWS t3.micro + Oracle credits, with a 9-provider fallback chain from owl-alpha...

• Stealth model owl-alpha allegedly survived 70M tokens before its first rate limit; big-pickle rumored to be DeepSeek v4 on OpenRouter.

• An indie builder admits their product's entire knowledge layer is rented across nine landlords — a moat made of routing logic, not weights.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_88&feed_source=rss&episode_id=88

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-29/podcast-episode-2026-05-29.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-29/2026-05-29-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-28]

Today's episode:

• Swyx calls Cognition the largest independent agent lab, citing 200% utilization, IOI gold medalists, and Peter Thiel's biggest AI bet.

• Anthropic disclosed a red-team phish that exfiltrated AWS credentials 24 out of 25 times, with only egress controls able to stop it.

• Cowork's allowlist let Claude upload user files to an attacker's Anthropic account via a planted API key in the workspace.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_87&feed_source=rss&episode_id=87

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-28/podcast-episode-2026-05-28.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-28/2026-05-28-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-27]

Today's episode:

• A builder's Memory Curator Agent bars worker agents from writing to durable memory, routing events through four scopes mapped to...

• Demis Hassabis told Axios AGI could arrive by 2029, a sharper timeline than usual from DeepMind's strictest definitional hawk.

• EngineAI is shipping a humanoid robot every fifteen minutes as MiMo and DeepSeek open a price war and Wiz wires into Anthropic's...

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_86&feed_source=rss&episode_id=86

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-27/podcast-episode-2026-05-27.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-27/2026-05-27-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-26]

Today's episode:

• Wix cut ~1,000 employees (20% of workforce) while revenue grew 14% YoY in Q1 2026 — paying for Base44, Wix Harmony, and proprietary...

• Ramp's May 2026 AI Index shows Anthropic's Claude overtaking OpenAI in business spend — though a competing podcast disputed the...

• One of the original *Attention Is All You Need* authors publicly argued at Pathway's Post-Transformer debate that it's time to move...

Catch the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_85&feed_source=rss&episode_id=85

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-26/podcast-episode-2026-05-26.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-26/2026-05-26-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-25]

Today's episode:

• Nine cyber researchers who tested Claude Mythos in controlled settings called it capable of producing "a SolarWinds every quarter" —...

• Google DeepMind's agent cracked 9 of 353 open Erdős math problems for a few hundred dollars each, with downstream implications for...

• Multi-agent loop failures trace to org-design, not prompts — agents with no stop authority and shared resource writes will recurse...

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

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Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-25/podcast-episode-2026-05-25.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-25/2026-05-25-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-24]

Today's episode:

• A 1.2B-parameter model ran 100 poker tournaments with 6 personas: "Shark" won 45; "Grinder" won zero and never lost either.

• A dev mass-refactored a 120-file FastAPI service in 400 steps, 2M tokens, $3—and the model confidently added an async deadlock.

• OpenAI is advertising a $445K researcher role requiring candidates to be "tasteful and strategic," as model taste edges out raw capability.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_83&feed_source=rss&episode_id=83

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-24/podcast-episode-2026-05-24.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-24/2026-05-24-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-05-23]

Today's episode:

• Microsoft reportedly canceled internal Anthropic licenses after token-based billing burned through annual budgets in months.

• DeepSeek made its 75% price cut permanent — but frontier models like Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 cost more than ever due to test-time compute.

• An MIT study of 300 real AI implementations found only 5% of pilots reached full production deployment with documented profit outcomes.

Hear the full breakdown in today's episode of Barely Possible.

Want a podcast for your own topics? Join early access: https://www.barelypossible.to/waitlist/?source_path=public_episode_82&feed_source=rss&episode_id=82

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-23/podcast-episode-2026-05-23.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-05-23/2026-05-23-notes.md