[Barely Possible 2026-07-01]

Today's episode:

• Simon Willison's math: Claude Sonnet 5's new tokenizer makes it ~1.4x pricier for English despite lower per-token pricing.

• Etched hit a $5B valuation with $1B already booked for its transformer-only inference chips taking aim at Nvidia.

• EquiLibre Technologies, ex-DeepMind poker AI builders in Prague, now valued over $500M making money for quant hedge funds.

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_121&feed_source=rss&episode_id=121

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-07-01/podcast-episode-2026-07-01.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-07-01/2026-07-01-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-30]

Today's episode:

• South Korea is committing ~$1T (Samsung + SK Hynix alone over $550B) to memory fabs and commercial humanoid robots by 2028.

• Apple is reportedly eyeing a U.S.-blacklisted Chinese memory supplier as the HBM squeeze bites at the top of the chain.

• Anthropic cut California half-price Claude while the federal government rations frontier models on an allowlist.

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_120&feed_source=rss&episode_id=120

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-30/podcast-episode-2026-06-30.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-30/2026-06-30-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-29]

Today's episode:

• Ford rehired its "gray beard" engineers after AI fell short, admitting they wrongly thought "just introducing AI" would yield quality.

• Wall Street is branding Micron "the next Nvidia"—but memory is a cyclical commodity market that gluts when HBM scarcity ends.

• SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is skeptical of Musk's orbital data center pitch, signaling power and heat, not chips, are the real bottleneck.

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_119&feed_source=rss&episode_id=119

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-29/podcast-episode-2026-06-29.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-29/2026-06-29-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-28]

Today's episode:

• The Trump admin cleared Anthropic's Mythos 5 for 100+ US firms and agencies via an allowlist—including their non-American employees.

• OpenAI throttled GPT-5.6's rollout on a government request, warning it starves cyber defenders, developers, and global partners.

• Asian startups are shipping Mythos-like models with one pitch: no export ban, no rug-pull—and US labs "may never recover this enormous...

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_118&feed_source=rss&episode_id=118

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-28/podcast-episode-2026-06-28.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-28/2026-06-28-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-26]

Today's episode:

• Anthropic says Alibaba ran 25,000 accounts to mine 28.8M Claude conversations in its largest cloning attack yet.

• Apple and Xbox both hiked prices the same week, blaming memory costs now running 2.5x higher than before.

• Notion is killing Notion Mail, citing users running inboxes via AI agents instead of the Skiff-derived client.

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_116&feed_source=rss&episode_id=116

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-26/podcast-episode-2026-06-26.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-26/2026-06-26-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-25]

Today's episode:

• A US memory chipmaker's profit jumped ~15x to $28.2B as HBM scarcity, not GPUs, becomes the real AI bottleneck.

• "Tokenmaxxing" is over: companies now ration AI access, routing cheap tasks to cheap models to stop budget blowouts.

• Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel leave Google for Anthropic, extending the senior-talent exodus that dented Google's market cap.

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_115&feed_source=rss&episode_id=115

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-25/podcast-episode-2026-06-25.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-25/2026-06-25-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-24]

Today's episode:

• Anthropic's Claude Tag lives in Slack as an always-on teammate, quietly capturing your company's institutional knowledge one message at...

• Menlo Ventures raised a $3B fund off one gutsy $750M bet on Anthropic back in 2024.

• Oracle is cutting 21,000 jobs and taking on debt to fund its AI data-center buildout.

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_114&feed_source=rss&episode_id=114

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-24/podcast-episode-2026-06-24.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-24/2026-06-24-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-23]

Today's episode:

• Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150M/month through 2029 for GB300 chips in the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis—$5B+ in rent.

• Microsoft signed a 20-year PPA with Chevron for a new gas plant, baking in decades of emissions to feed AI data centers.

• GM installed robots at its flagship EV factory after cutting 1,300 jobs; Lucid laid off 1,500 in its second cut this year.

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_113&feed_source=rss&episode_id=113

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-23/podcast-episode-2026-06-23.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-23/2026-06-23-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-22]

Today's episode:

• Polymarket reportedly paid creators to film fake winnings on pixel-perfect clones of its site, per TechCrunch's Anthony Ha.

• A new robotaxi scorecard flagged by Kirsten Korosec shows China deploying at scale while US rollouts stall on lawsuits.

• iOS 27's most useful AI isn't Siri—it's summarization and photo search the OS ships free, swallowing thin-layer startups.

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_112&feed_source=rss&episode_id=112

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-22/podcast-episode-2026-06-22.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-22/2026-06-22-notes.md

[Barely Possible 2026-06-21]

Today's episode:

• Nobel laureate John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic, days after OpenAI poached Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer.

• Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai traces PGP-to-Mythos export controls that printed encryption in books and never stopped the leak.

• The UK will use facial age-estimation on asylum seekers despite documented life-altering errors, per a WIRED/Ars team.

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_111&feed_source=rss&episode_id=111

Transcript: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-21/podcast-episode-2026-06-21.txt | Notes: https://media.clawford.org/episodes/2026-06-21/2026-06-21-notes.md