In the Weights is your new AI-driven research

Anyone who has searched on Google recently knows that it’s not as good as it used to be. Sure, there’s everything going on with Google Search itself, but there’s also the inescapable feeling that web search is no longer the primary source of information it once was, with many people learning about who we are through chatbots.

Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, which led them to create In the Weights. The “weights” in question are the numerical parameters that make up the training and output of an AI model, so the website aims to measure how well “the model is able to remember a person without using tools like web search.”

“Your presence in the weights means that your presence was important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the site says.

To achieve this, In the Weights is supposed to query various models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, and Llama, as well as lesser-known models) with a question similar to “Who is he?” ? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence. Then “mass[s] Similar descriptions together and set[s] Degree of strength.”

For example, this humble tech blogger has a power score of 641, which puts me in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I saw that several of my colleagues at TechCrunch had higher scores. And the leaderboard has been changing as I write this post, with “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin currently in first place with 988 points, tied with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

The results also show which models returned answers for a particular name, and highlight possible hallucinations – GPT-5.4 Mini appears to say that Anthony Ha is a “vague name model that can 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 joined through the acquisition of design startup Global Illumination).

Dimson said he was thinking that “trivial Google searches will be the wrong target in 2026 as more traffic moves to MBAs” and the fact that “a lot of lives are somehow encoded in a bunch of floating point numbers inside an AI brain.” He also said that the site’s direction was “stamped” by a satirical blog post that riffed on AI weights and Terry Beeson’s classic short story “They’re Made of Meat.”

“The reception has been crazy so far, and we thought this would be simple curiosity, but it seems to have struck a chord of wanting to know if you live forever in superintelligence (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt either!),” Dimson added.

While I’m not convinced that chatbots “remembering” you is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, I can’t deny that I find the results interesting and envy-inducing, especially since they’re codified into an easy-to-comparable score. (AI critic Anthony Moser quipped that this is “literally like asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.”) Also helping: the fact that the site features a nice retro, Nintendo-inspired design.

Dimson said he plans to dig deeper into why different models in the same series give different results, which models are biased toward different types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”