For creators and artists navigating the shifting landscape of digital visibility, the era of vanity searches is evolving. The days of simply Googling your name to find a definitive snapshot of your public persona are fading, replaced by a fragmented reality where chatbots and large language models (LLMs) increasingly dictate what the world knows about you. This shift means that your professional reputation is no longer solely anchored in search engine results pages, but is instead encoded within the internal parameters of artificial intelligence systems.
Measuring your place in the machine
Responding to this changing information ecosystem, Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn launched In the Weights. The platform measures how effectively various AI models recall a specific individual without accessing external web sources. As the site explains, being “in the weights” signifies that your existence was considered significant enough to be embedded directly into the training data of superhuman artificial intelligence.
How the scoring works
The tool queries a diverse range of models—including Grok, Gemini, multiple GPT versions, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known variants—with a standard prompt: “Who is <name>? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.” The system then clusters similar descriptions and assigns a strength score to quantify how well the AI remembers you.
In a recent test, the author received a strength score of 641, placing them in the top 6% of names tested. However, the leaderboard is dynamic; as of the time of writing, actor Macaulay Culkin holds the top spot with a score of 988, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. The interface also highlights discrepancies between models, such as a report from GPT-5.4 Mini describing Anthony Ha as an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.,” effectively flagging potential hallucinations.
Why build this now?
Dimson told TechCrunch that the project emerged after he and Flynn left OpenAI, following the acquisition of their design startup, Global Illumination. They sought to “get the creative juices flowing again” by exploring a new frontier. Dimson noted that traditional Google vanity searches are becoming an outdated objective in 2026 as traffic migrates toward LLMs. He observed that so many lives are now encoded within floating-point numbers inside an AI’s brain, a concept inspired by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
Dimson remarked that the reception has been intense, noting, “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.” While the comparison to immortality may be hyperbolic, the ability to see one’s digital footprint codified into a comparable score is undeniably intriguing.
Future updates will delve deeper into why different models in the same series return varying results, which models exhibit bias toward specific demographics, and which notable individuals deserve a Wikipedia entry but currently do not.
Key takeaways
- In the Weights is a new tool that scores how well various AI models remember you without using web search.
- Creator Thomas Dimson built the site after leaving OpenAI to explore how human lives are encoded in AI training weights.
- Results vary significantly between models, with some flagging ambiguity or potential hallucinations about your identity.
- The platform offers a unique, retro-styled leaderboard that ranks individuals based on their “strength” in the AI brain.
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