Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, former OpenAI designers, have launched a new website called In the Weights that lets you check how well AI models remember you. The tool queries multiple large language models (LLMs) — including Grok, Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Llama — and assigns a strength score based on how consistently and confidently they recall a given name. Macaulay Culkin currently tops the leaderboard with a score of 988, followed by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti at 950.
Why Build an AI Vanity Search?
Dimson told TechCrunch that he and Flynn were looking to “get the creative juices flowing again” after leaving OpenAI, which they joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination. Dimson said 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.”
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The direction of the site 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.” Dimson added that “reception has been insane so far, we thought this would be a mild curiosity but it seems like it has struck a nerve.”
How the Scoring Works
The site queries each model with a prompt similar to: “Who is [name]? 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.” The results also show which models returned answers for a given name and highlight potential hallucinations. For example, GPT-5.4 Mini described Anthony Ha, a TechCrunch editor, as an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials A.H.A.”
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While AI critic Anthony Moser scoffed that this is “literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself,” the site’s retro Nintendo-inspired design and easy-to-compare scores have made it a curiosity. Dimson plans to dig further into why different models return different results, which models are biased toward certain types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is In the Weights?
In the Weights is a website that measures how well different AI models can recall a person without using web search. It queries models like GPT, Claude, and Gemini and assigns a strength score based on the consistency and confidence of their responses.
Who created In the Weights?
The site was created by Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, former OpenAI employees who joined the company through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination. They built it to explore how AI models encode information about individuals.
How does the scoring work?
The tool asks each model a question like ‘Who is [name]? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.’ It then clusters similar descriptions and assigns a strength score. A higher score indicates that the name is more consistently and confidently recalled across models.
Why is it called ‘In the Weights’?
The name refers to the numerical parameters, or ‘weights,’ that shape an AI model’s training and output. Being ‘in the weights’ means a person’s existence was deemed important enough to be encoded in the model’s parameters during training.
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