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In the Weights is your new AI-centric vanity search

8 h ago

Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn, former OpenAI employees who joined through the acquisition of their design startup Global Illumination, created a website called "In the Weights" to measure how well AI models recall individuals without using web search. The "weights" refer to numerical parameters shaping an AI model's training and output. The site queries models including Grok, Gemini, multiple GPT versions, Claude, Llama, and lesser-known ones with a question like "Who is <name>? Give up to 10 results..." then clusters descriptions and assigns a strength score. For example, a tech blogger received a strength score of 641, placing in the top 6% of names, though several TechCrunch colleagues scored higher. The leaderboard shifts frequently, currently topped by Macaulay Culkin (score 988) and Luciano Pavarotti. Results show which models returned which answers and highlight potential hallucinations—e.g., GPT-5.4 Mini described Anthony Ha as an "ambiguous name form." Dimson told TechCrunch they built In the Weights to reignite creative energy after leaving OpenAI. 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." The site's direction was sealed by a humorous blog post riffing on AI weights and a Terry Bisson short story. Dimson said reception has been "insane," striking a nerve about wanting to see if one "lives forever in the super intelligence." He plans to explore why different models return varying results, biases toward certain people, and who "should have a Wikipedia article but don’t." The site features a Nintendo-inspired retro design.