A new vanity site, In the Weights, ranks how different AI models “recall” a person—turning chatbot mentions into a single confidence-based strength score. Its creator says the project grew out of a frustration with search’s changing role and a belief that peop
Type your name into In the Weights and you don’t get a polite answer back. You get a number.
The site is built around a simple idea: the “weights” of an AI model—the numerical parameters that shape training and output—may reveal how easily an AI can identify you without reaching for web search. In the Weights claims it measures how well “a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.”.
The pitch is playful, but the premise lands with a familiar unease. The website tells users, “Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence.”
To produce the results, In the Weights queries multiple AI models with a prompt framed like: “Who is ? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.” The site then clusters similar descriptions and assigns a strength score.
It includes major model families—Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, and Llama—along with lesser-known models. For users, the outcome feels like a ranking system for who the internet (and now chatbots) thinks you are.
One tech blogger says they received a strength score of 641, placing them in the top 6% of names. As they watched. the leaderboard kept moving. with “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin sitting in the top slot at the time of writing with a strength score of 988. Culkin was “neck-and-neck” with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.
The page doesn’t just aim for bragging rights. It also shows which models returned which answers for a given name, and it flags potential hallucinations. The example given is GPT-5.4 Mini. which describes Anthony Ha as an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A.”.
Behind the site are Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn. Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn created it because they “were looking to ‘get the creative juices flowing again’” after leaving OpenAI. Both had joined OpenAI through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination.
Dimson also tied the idea to what he sees as a shift in how people find information. He said he was thinking about how “Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs. ” and about how “so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain.”.
The direction of the site was “sealed” for Dimson by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic short story “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
So far, he says, the reaction has been more than curiosity. “Reception has been insane so far. 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 (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt either!). ” Dimson wrote.
Not everyone is charmed by the premise. AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that it is “literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.” Even with that pushback. the site’s strongest hook for users appears to be the score itself—an easy-to-compare number wrapped around how different models talk about the same name.
The site’s design leans into that lighter mood with a “cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design,” helping turn a complicated subject into something you can click through and compare.
Dimson said he plans to dig further into why models in the same series return different results. which models are biased toward different types of people. and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.” Whether those scores translate into anything like permanence is another question. For now. In the Weights has given people a new way to worry. joke. compete. and wonder—one strength score at a time.
In the Weights AI vanity search chatbot hallucinations AI weights Grok Gemini GPT Claude Llama LLMs
so basically it’s telling you how “important” you are to AI? kinda creepy honestly
I typed my name and it didn’t even explain nothing, just gave me some number?? like thanks, that’s super helpful. also how is it “recalling” me if I never told it anything
wait Macaulay Culkin is top?? that means it’s pulling from Wikipedia or whatever right. “strength score” sounds made up, like it’s just a popularity contest not actual memory. plus Pavarotti?? I’m getting conspiracy vibes like it’s tracking celebs more
This is just another vanity thing, like those “what does your name mean” sites but with chatbots. people will freak out but it’s probably just comparing training data frequency or something. still, the part about “superhuman AI” and being in the weights… no thanks. I bet if you’ve ever searched your own name it’ll rank higher, right? lol.