
In the Weights is your new AI-centric vanity search
Anyone whoâs Googled themselves recently knows that it doesnât quite hit the way it used to. Sure, thereâseverything going on with Google search itself, but thereâs also an inescapable feeling that web search isnât the canonical source of information that it used to be, with just as many people learning about who you and I might be from chatbots. Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, leading them to createIn the Weights. Theâweightsâin question are the numerical parameters that shape an AI modelâs training and output, so the websitepurportsto measure how well âa model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.â âBeing in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,â the website says. To achieve this, In the Weights supposedly queries different models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, and Llama, plus lesser known models) with a question similar to, âWho is <name>? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.â It then âcluster[s] similar descriptions together and assign[s] a strength score.â For example,this humble tech bloggerreceived a strength score of 641, placing me in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I saw thatmultipleTechCrunchcolleaguesscored even higher. And theleaderboardhas been shifting as I write this post, with âHome Aloneâ star Macaulay Culkin currently in the top slot with a strength score of 988, neck-and-neck with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. The results also show which models returned which answers for a given name, and they highlight potential hallucinations â apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says that Anthony Ha is an âambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A.â Asked why he built In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn were looking to âget the creative juices flowing againâ after leaving OpenAI (which they both joined throughthe acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination). Dimson said he was thinking about how âGoogle vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMsâ and about the fact that âso many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain.â He also said the direction of the site was âsealedâ bya tongue-in-cheek blog postriffing on AI weights and Terry Bissonâs classic short storyâTheyâre Made Out of Meat.â âReception has been insane so far, we thought this would be a mild curiosity but it seems like it has struck a nerve of wanting to see if you live forever in the super intelligence (the comparison factor doesnât hurt either!)â Dimson added. While Iâm not as convinced that being ârememberedâ by a chatbot is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, I canât deny that I find the results both intriguing and jealousy-inducing, especially since theyâre codified in an easy-to-compare score. (AI critic Anthony Moserscoffedthat this is âliterally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.â) Also helping: The fact that the site features a cute,Nintendo-inspiredretro design. Dimson said he plans to dig in further into why different models in the same series return different results, which models are biased towards different types of people, and which people âshould have a Wikipedia article but donât.â