In the Weights Debuts AI-Powered Vanity Search

Anyone who has recently Googled themselves knows the experience doesn't feel the same as before. Between the changes to Google Search and the growing reliance on chatbots, web search no longer feels like the definitive source of information it once was.

Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn shared that feeling, which led them to create In the Weights. The "weights" refer to the numerical parameters that define an AI model's training and output. The site claims to measure how well a model can recall someone without relying on web search tools.

According to the site, "Being in the weights means your existence was considered significant in the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence."

To accomplish this, In the Weights reportedly queries various models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known ones) with a prompt like, “Who is ? Provide up to 10 results, each with a brief description and confidence.” It then “clusters similar descriptions and assigns a strength score.”

Image credit: In the Weights

For instance, this modest tech blogger got a strength score of 641, putting me in the top 6% of names. I felt pretty good until I noticed that several TechCrunch colleagues scored even higher. The leaderboard has been changing as I write this post, with “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin currently holding the top spot at 988, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

The results also reveal which models returned answers for a given name and flag potential hallucinations — for instance, GPT-5.4 Mini claims Anthony Ha is an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A.”

When asked why he built In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn wanted to “get the creative juices flowing again” after leaving OpenAI (they both joined OpenAI through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination).

Dimson said he was reflecting on how “Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs” and on the fact that “so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain.” He added that the site's direction was “sealed” by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson's classic short story “They're Made Out of Meat.”

“The reception has been insane so far,” Dimson added. “We thought this would be a mild curiosity, but it seems to have struck a nerve — people want to see if they live forever in the super intelligence (and the comparison factor doesn't hurt either!)”

Image credit: In the Weights

While I'm not entirely convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot is a sure path to immortality, I can't deny the results are both fascinating and envy-inducing, especially since they're expressed in a simple, comparable score. (AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is “literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.”) Also adding to its appeal: the site features a cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design.

Dimson said he plans to dive deeper into why different models within the same series return different results, which models are biased toward certain types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don't.”