Remember the last time you Googled yourself? It probably didn't feel as satisfying as it used to. Beyond the ongoing shifts in Google search itself, there's a growing sense that web search is no longer the definitive source of information it once was. More and more people are learning about others through chatbots. Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn felt this shift too, which inspired them to create In the Weights. Here, "weights" refer to the numerical parameters that guide an AI model's training and output. The site aims to measure "how well a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search."

"Being in the weights means your existence was deemed important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence," the website states. To pull this off, In the Weights supposedly queries various models—including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known ones—with a prompt like, "Who is . Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence." It then "cluster[s] similar descriptions together and assign[s] a strength score."

For example, this humble tech blogger received a strength score of 641, placing me in the top 6% of names. The leaderboard has been shifting even as I write this post, with "Home Alone" star Macaulay Culkin currently at the top with a strength score of 988, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. The results also reveal which models returned answers for a given name, and they highlight potential hallucinations—apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says that Anthony Ha is an "ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A. H. A." Dimson explained that he was thinking about how "Google vanity searches are the wrong objective in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs" and about the fact that "so many lives are encoded somehow in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain." He also noted that the site's direction was "sealed" by a tongue-in-cheek blog post riffing on AI weights and Terry Bisson's classic short story "They're Made Out of Meat."

"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 added.

While I'm not entirely convinced that being "remembered" by a chatbot guarantees immortality, I can't deny that I find the results both intriguing and jealousy-inducing—especially since they're codified in an easy-to-compare score. (AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is "literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.") Another appealing feature is the site's cute, Nintendo-inspired retro design. Dimson said he plans to dig further into why different 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."