Anyone who’s used Google themselves recently knows that it doesn’t hit like it used to. Sure, there’s everything going on with Google search itself, but there’s also the inevitable feeling that web search isn’t the authoritative source of information it used to be, just as many people are learning about you and me from chatbots.
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, which led them to form In the Weights. The “weights” in question are numerical parameters that make up the training and output of an AI model, so the website aims to measure “how well the model can remember a person without using tools like web search.”
“Being in the weights means that your presence is considered important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the website says.
To accomplish this, Weights is said to ask different models (including Grok, Gemini, many versions of GPT, Claude, and Llama, as well as lesser-known models) with a question like, “Who
For example, this humble blogger scored 641 power points, putting me in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I noticed that many of my TechCrunch colleagues scored even higher. And the leaderboard has been changing as I write this post, with “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin currently in the top spot with 988 power points, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.
The results also show which models returned answers for a given name, and highlight potential ideas – apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says Anthony Ha is “an obscure name form that can mean many people with the initials AHA”
Asked why he created 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 both joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination).
Dimson said he thought “Google’s futility search is a misguided goal in 2026 as more people move to LLMs” and the fact that “many lives are somehow coded into a collection of floating-point numbers inside an AI brain.” He also said the site’s direction was “sealed” with a tongue-in-cheek blog post lamenting the rigors of AI and Terry Bisson’s classic short story “Made of Flesh.”
“The reception has been mixed so far, we thought this would be a bit of a curiosity but it seems that it has sparked an interest in wanting to see if you live forever in a super genius (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt!)” added Dimson.
Although I’m not convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, I can’t deny that I find the results intriguing and enviable, especially since they’re combined in a result that’s easy to compare. (AI critic Anthony Moser quipped that this is “literally like asking 13 chatbots to tell you about you.”) Also helping: The fact that the site has a nice retro, Nintendo-inspired design.
Dimson said he plans to focus on why different models in 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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