In the Weights: Your New AI-Driven Search Engine
▼ Summary
– In the Weights is a website that measures how well AI models can recall a person without using web search, assigning a strength score based on clustering similar descriptions from multiple models.
– The site was created by Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, former OpenAI employees, to explore how “Google vanity searches are the wrong objective” as traffic shifts to large language models.
– Users receive a strength score (e.g., a tech blogger got 641, in the top 6%), with top performers like Macaulay Culkin scoring 988, and results can change over time.
– The tool highlights potential hallucinations, such as one model describing a name as “ambiguous” when it refers to a specific person.
– Dimson plans to investigate why different models in the same series vary, which models favor certain people, and who should have a Wikipedia article but does not.
Anyone who has typed their own name into Google lately knows the experience feels different. It is not just the state of Google search itself. There is a growing sense that web search no longer holds the status it once did as the definitive source of truth. More and more, people learn about who you are from chatbots.
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn felt that shift too. That feeling led them to create In the Weights, a new AI-driven tool that measures how well large language models remember a person without relying on web search. The “weights” refer to the numerical parameters that define an AI model’s training and output. The site claims to assess “how well a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.”
“Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the site declares.
To compile its rankings, In the Weights queries multiple models including Grok, Gemini, several versions of GPT, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known ones. It asks each a question along the lines of, “Who is
This humble tech blogger, for instance, earned a strength score of 641, landing in the top 6% of names. That felt decent until I noticed multiple TechCrunch colleagues scoring higher. The leaderboard shifts even as I write. Right now, “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin holds the top spot with a score of 988, neck-and-neck with opera legend Luciano Pavarotti.
The results also reveal which models returned which answers for a given name, and they flag potential hallucinations. Apparently, GPT-5.4 Mini thinks “Anthony Ha” is an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A. H. A.”
When asked why he built the tool, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn wanted to “get the creative juices flowing again” after leaving OpenAI. Both joined the company through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination.
Dimson explained that he was thinking about how “Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs.” He also reflected on the fact that “so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain.” The direction of the site was “sealed,” he said, by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic short story “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
“Reception 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 doesn’t hurt either!),” Dimson added.
I am not fully convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot guarantees immortality. Still, I cannot deny the results are intriguing and jealousy-inducing, especially when codified into an easy-to-compare score. AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is “literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.” The site’s cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design certainly helps the appeal.
Dimson plans to dig deeper into why different models in the same series return different results, which models show bias toward certain types of people, and which individuals “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”
(Source: TechCrunch)
