Anyone who\u2019s Googled themselves recently knows that it doesn\u2019t quite hit the way it used to. Sure, there\u2019s everything going on with Google search itself, but there\u2019s also an inescapable feeling that web search isn\u2019t the canonical source of information that it used to be, with just as many people learning about who you and I might be from chatbots.<\/p>\n
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, leading them to create In the Weights.\u00a0The \u201cweights\u201d in question are the numerical parameters that shape an AI model\u2019s training and output, so the website purports to measure how well \u201ca model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,\u201d the website says.<\/p>\n
To achieve this, In the Weights supposedly queries different models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, and Llama, plus lesser known models) with a question similar to, \u201cWho is <name>? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.\u201d It then \u201ccluster[s] similar descriptions together and assign[s] a strength score.\u201d<\/p>\n For example, this humble tech blogger received a strength score of 641, placing me in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I saw that multiple TechCrunch colleagues scored even higher. And the leaderboard has been shifting as I write this post, with \u201cHome Alone\u201d star Macaulay Culkin currently in the top slot with a strength score of 988, neck-and-neck with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.<\/p>\n The results also show which models returned which answers for a given name, and they highlight potential hallucinations \u2014 apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says that Anthony Ha is an \u201cambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked why he built In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn were looking to \u201cget the creative juices flowing again\u201d after leaving OpenAI (which they both joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination).\u00a0<\/p>\n Dimson said he was thinking about how \u201cGoogle vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs\u201d and about the fact that \u201cso many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain.\u201d He also said the direction of the site was \u201csealed\u201d by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson\u2019s classic short story \u201cThey\u2019re Made Out of Meat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReception 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\u2019t hurt either!)\u201d Dimson added.<\/p>\n While I\u2019m not as convinced that being \u201cremembered\u201d by a chatbot is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, I can\u2019t deny that I find the results both intriguing and jealousy-inducing, especially since they\u2019re codified in an easy-to-compare score. (AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is \u201cliterally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.\u201d) Also helping: The fact that the site features a cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design.<\/p>\n Dimson said he plans to dig in further into why different models in the same series return different results, which models are biased towards different types of people, and which people \u201cshould have a Wikipedia article but don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/06\/20\/in-the-weights-is-your-new-ai-centric-vanity-search\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/GettyImages-1278815846.jpg?resize=1200,800″] Anyone who\u2019s Googled themselves recently knows that it doesn\u2019t quite hit the way it used to. Sure, there\u2019s everything going on with Google search itself, but there\u2019s also an inescapable feeling that web search isn\u2019t the canonical source of information that it used to be, with just as many people learning about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,62],"class_list":["post-2002266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-techcrunch-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2002266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2002266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2002266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2002266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/intheweights-profile.jpg?w=672\")
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