In the Weights is your new AI-centric vanity search
Anyone who has done any Googling themselves recently knows that it no longer works as it used to. Of course, there’s a lot going on with Google Search itself, but there’s also an inescapable feeling that web search is no longer the canonical source of information it used to be, with just as many people finding out who you and I might be through chatbots.
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, which led them to create At the weights. The ‘weights’ in question are the numerical parameters that determine the training and output of an AI model, i.e. the website claims to measure how well “a model can remember someone without using tools such as internet searches.”
“If you are in the weights, it means that your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the website says.
To achieve this, In the Weights would interrogate various models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude and Llama, plus lesser-known models) with a question similar to: “Who is
For example, this humble tech blogger received a strength score of 641, putting me in the top 6% of names. I felt pretty good until I saw that several TechCrunch colleagues scored even higher. And the ranking is changing as I write this post, with ‘Home Alone’ star Macaulay Culkin currently in the top spot with a strength rating 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 possible hallucinations – apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says Anthony Ha is an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials AHA”
When asked why he built In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn were looking to “get the creative juices flowing again” after leaving OpenAI (which they both joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination).
Dimson said he was thinking about how “vanity searches on Google are the wrong target in 2026 when more traffic goes to LLMs” and about the fact that “so many lives are somehow encoded in a bunch of floating point numbers in the AI brain.” He also said the direction of the location was “sealed.” an ironic blog post about AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic short story “They are made of meat.”
“The reception has been insane so far. We thought this would be mild curiosity, but it seems like it has struck a nerve to want to see if you live in the superintelligence forever (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt either!),” Dimson added.
While I’m not so convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot guarantees immortality, I can’t deny that I find the results both intriguing and envy-inducing, especially since they’re captured in an easy-to-compare score. (AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is “literally like asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.”) Also helping: the fact that the site has a cute, Nintendo inspired retro design.
Dimson said he plans to further elaborate on why different models in the same series produce different results, which models are biased toward different types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”
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