In the Weights is your new AI-centric vanity search

A new website called In the Weights measures how well AI models recall information about individuals without using web search, offering a leaderboard that ranks people by a "strength score" derived from chatbot responses [1]. The site, created by Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, queries models including Grok, Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Llama with a prompt similar to "Who is ?" and then clusters similar descriptions to assign a score [1]. The score reflects how strongly a model can recall someone without external tools. "Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence," the website states [1]. Dimson and Flynn both previously worked at OpenAI, which they joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination [1]. OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, released ChatGPT in November 2022, an event credited with catalyzing the current AI boom [7]. The organization later created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 and, in 2025, restructured it into a public benefit corporation partially controlled by the nonprofit [7]. On In the Weights, the author of the TechCrunch article received a score of 641, placing in the top 6% of names [1]. Actor Macaulay Culkin held the top slot with a score of 988, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti [1]. The results also flag potential hallucinations; GPT-5.4 Mini reportedly described one name as an "ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people" [1]. Dimson told TechCrunch that he and Flynn built the site to "get the creative juices flowing again" after leaving OpenAI [1]. He noted that "Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs" and that "so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain" [1]. The project's direction was influenced by a blog post linking AI weights to Terry Bisson's short story "They're Made Out of Meat" [1]. "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 said [1]. He plans to investigate why different models in the same series return different results, which models show bias toward certain types of people, and which individuals "should have a Wikipedia article but don't" [1].