Who hasn't Googled themselves to see what the world says about them? For years, vanity search has been a common pastime, but things are changing. With the rise of chatbots and large language models, information about us is increasingly stored not in traditional web indexes but in the numerical weights of neural networks. This insight led to the creation of In the Weights, a new AI tool that measures how well an artificial model "remembers" a person without using web search.
How In the Weights Works
Created by Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, two former OpenAI designers who joined through the acquisition of Global Illumination, the site queries various language models including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known ones. The question is simple: "Who is [name]? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence." Answers are then clustered into similar groups, and each name receives a strength score from 0 to 1000.
Sponsored Protocol
For instance, a tech blogger received a score of 641, placing in the top 6% of names. But the leaderboard is dominated by famous people: actor Macaulay Culkin leads with 988 points, followed by tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Results shift in real time and show which models responded and where hallucinations occurred. In one case, GPT-5.4 Mini described Anthony Ha as an "ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A."
Why It Was Built
Dimson explained that he and Flynn wanted to "get the creative juices flowing again" after leaving OpenAI. The idea came from realizing that Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs. Additionally, "so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain." The project's name was sealed by a satirical blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson's classic short story "They're Made Out of Meat."
Sponsored Protocol
Reception has been overwhelming. "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 added. The site features a retro Nintendo-inspired design that adds to its charm.
Implications and Criticism
Some critics, like Anthony Moser, downplayed the enthusiasm, calling it "literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself." However, the tool offers fascinating insight into how AI models perceive us. Dimson plans to explore why different models in the same series return different results, which models are biased toward certain types of people, and who "should have a Wikipedia article but don't."
Sponsored Protocol
In an increasingly AI-pervasive landscape, tools like In the Weights invite us to reflect on our digital footprint. Isn't this a new way to seek fame? If you're curious, try discovering your own score. You might find you are more famous than you think, at least in the parallel universe of neural networks.
To explore the topic of AI-based digital clones, read the article on Karamo Brown who launched Kē, a wellness app featuring his AI digital clone. For a technical overview of large language models, check the Wikipedia entry.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/20/in-the-weights-is-your-new-ai-centric-vanity-search
