In the Weights: A new AI-centric vanity search that measures how well models remember you
Former OpenAI employees Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn have launched In the Weights, a website that queries multiple AI models to see how well they recall a person without using web search, assigning a strength score.
Googling yourself doesn't feel the same anymore. With chatbots becoming a primary source of information about people, former OpenAI employees Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn have created In the Weights. The name refers to the numerical parameters that shape an AI model's training and output, and the site measures how well a model can recall someone without using web search. As the website states, "Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence."
In the Weights queries various models—including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known models—with a question like "Who is <name>? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence." It then clusters similar descriptions and assigns a strength score. For instance, a TechCrunch journalist received a score of 641, placing him in the top 6%—though his colleagues scored higher. The leaderboard currently features Macaulay Culkin at the top with 988, followed by Luciano Pavarotti. The results also show which models returned answers and highlight potential hallucinations; e.g., GPT-5.4 Mini suggested that "Anthony Ha" is an "ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A."
Dimson explained that he and Flynn wanted to "get the creative juices flowing again" after leaving OpenAI. He noted that "Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs" and that "so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain." The direction was sealed by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson's story "They're Made Out of Meat." "Reception has been insane so far," Dimson added. "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 doesn't hurt either!)."
The site features a cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design. While some, like AI critic Anthony Moser, dismiss it as "literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself," Dimson plans to dig into why different models in the same series return different results, which models are biased towards different types of people, and which people "should have a Wikipedia article but don't."
