Anyone who has searched Google recently knows that it isn’t as successful as it used to be. Of course, everything is going on in Google Search itself, but with so many people finding out who you and I are through chatbots, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that web searches aren’t the standard source of information they used to be.
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn felt similarly and created In the Weights. The “weights” in question are numerical parameters that shape the training and output of an AI model, so the website claims to measure “how well the model can remember people without using tools like web searches.”
“Being in the spotlight means your presence was considered important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the website says.
To achieve this, In the Weights supposedly queries a variety of models (including Grok, Gemini, several versions of GPT, Claude and Llama, and lesser-known models) using questions similar to the following: ? Please provide up to 10 results. Each result includes a brief description and a confidence rating,” and then “clusters similar descriptions together and assigns a strength score.”
For example, this humble tech blogger had a strength score of 641, putting him in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I saw several of my TechCrunch colleagues scoring higher. And the leaderboard is changing as I write this. “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin currently sits in first place with a strength score of 988, going head-to-head with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.
The results also show which models returned which answers for specific names and highlight potential hallucinations. Apparently GPT-5.4 Mini is, as Anthony Ha puts it, “an ambiguous form of name that can refer to several people with the initials AHA.”
When asked why he created In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn were trying to “get the creativity flowing again” after leaving OpenAI (which they both joined through the acquisition of design startup Global Illumination).
Dimson said he’s thinking about the fact that “Google vanity searches are the wrong target as more traffic moves to LLMs in 2026” and that “there’s a lot of life somehow encoded in a bunch of floating point numbers inside an AI brain.” He also said the site’s direction was “sealed” by blog posts joking about AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic short story “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
“The response so far has been crazy. We thought this would be a mild curiosity, but it seems to have struck a nerve to know if you’ll live forever in a superintelligence (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt either!),” Dimson added.
I’m not convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, but I can’t deny that the results are interesting and envy-inducing, especially since they’re coded into easy-to-compare scores. (AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this was “literally like asking 13 chatbots to tell you about themselves.”) What also helps is the fact that the site features a cute retro design inspired by Nintendo.
Dimson said he plans to look further into why different models of the same series return different results, which models are biased against different types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”
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