For decades, the ultimate barometer of one’s digital footprint was the "vanity search"—that nervous, ego-driven ritual of plugging your own name into a search engine to see how the world perceives you. But as we navigate the landscape of 2026, the internet is undergoing a tectonic shift. Google search, once the undisputed gatekeeper of human knowledge, is increasingly being bypassed in favor of generative AI. Today, the question isn’t just "What does the web say about me?" but rather, "Does the AI know who I am?"
Enter In the Weights, a curious, retro-styled platform created by industry veterans Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn. The site offers a digital mirror for the modern age, quantifying exactly how well various large language models (LLMs) can recall an individual without relying on live web search tools. By measuring an entity’s presence within the "weights"—the internal numerical parameters that define an AI’s knowledge base—the site attempts to answer a provocative question: Who has been deemed important enough to be encoded into the "brain" of the next generation of intelligence?
The Mechanics of Digital Immortality
The premise of In the Weights is deceptively simple. The platform queries an array of top-tier AI models—including OpenAI’s GPT series, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, and the open-source Llama—with a standardized prompt: "Who is [Name]? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence."
The system then aggregates these disparate responses, clustering similar descriptions and assigning a "strength score" based on how consistently and accurately the models can retrieve information about the subject. The resulting score serves as a proxy for an individual’s "AI footprint."
A high score suggests that an individual’s life, work, and reputation have been sufficiently baked into the training data to be considered "common knowledge" by a machine. A low score—or no result at all—implies a relative invisibility in the eyes of the silicon-based intelligences that are increasingly shaping our information ecosystem.
From OpenAI to "In the Weights": A Chronology
The genesis of In the Weights is rooted in the post-OpenAI career trajectory of its founders. Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn are no strangers to the inner workings of massive AI systems. Both joined OpenAI following the company’s 2023 acquisition of their design studio, Global Illumination.
After departing the AI giant, the pair found themselves in a reflective state, eager to "get the creative juices flowing" once more. Their inspiration was sparked by a mix of existential dread and technological cynicism. Dimson recalls being struck by a thought: Google vanity searches are a relic of the past, a legacy objective that fails to capture where the real cultural and informational traffic is moving in 2026.
The project was solidified by a viral blog post by Max Leiter, which riffed on Terry Bisson’s classic 1991 short story, They’re Made Out of Meat. In Bisson’s story, aliens discuss the horror of discovering that humans are "thinking meat." Dimson and Flynn applied this lens to modern LLMs, wondering, "If we are made of meat, are we also made of floating-point numbers?"
The site launched to immediate, albeit somewhat startled, public attention. What the founders expected to be a "mild curiosity" quickly became a viral obsession, as users flocked to the site to check their scores, compare them with colleagues, and grapple with the surreal realization that their identity could be reduced to a mathematical parameter within a neural network.
Supporting Data: The Hierarchy of Recognition
The current leaderboard on In the Weights reads like a snapshot of global pop culture and historical significance. At the time of writing, stars like Macaulay Culkin compete for the top spots against historical titans like Luciano Pavarotti, with strength scores reaching into the high 900s.
For the average professional, however, the results offer a more sobering view of their relative influence. A typical tech journalist or mid-level professional might land a score in the 600s, placing them in the top tier of recognized individuals, yet far from the "canonical" status of global icons.
The data also exposes the inherent inconsistencies of AI models. Because these models are trained on different datasets and utilize different architectures, their "knowledge" of the same person can vary wildly. Some models might produce a coherent biography, while others—like the experimental GPT-5.4 Mini—might hallucinate, describing a person as an "ambiguous name form" or misidentifying them entirely. These discrepancies are not just bugs; they are insights into the biases and data gaps inherent in the training sets of the most powerful companies on earth.
Official Responses and Philosophical Pushback
The reaction to In the Weights has been a mix of fascination, validation, and biting skepticism. While users enjoy the gamification of their own existence, industry critics are quick to point out the limitations of the methodology.
AI researcher Anthony Moser famously scoffed at the platform on social media, noting that the site is "literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself." This criticism touches on a fundamental truth: the "weight" score is not a measure of an individual’s objective worth or moral character, but rather a reflection of the noise-to-signal ratio in the vast, often biased, corpus of the internet that fed the model.
Despite the skepticism, Dimson remains undeterred. He views the platform as a living experiment. His future roadmap for the site includes deep dives into why specific models favor certain demographics over others and, perhaps most interestingly, an investigation into "Wikipedia-less" individuals—people who have achieved a level of notoriety that isn’t captured by traditional encyclopedic standards but is nonetheless present in the neural pathways of AI.
The Implications: Is This Our New Legacy?
The broader implications of In the Weights are profound. If search engines were the "front door" to the internet, AI models are now becoming the "living room"—a place where information is processed, synthesized, and sometimes invented.
If your life is not "in the weights," you are, for all intents and purposes, a ghost in the machine. This raises uncomfortable questions about digital literacy and the future of fame. Are we entering an era where people will optimize their lives, careers, and online personas specifically to increase their "weight score" within the models? Will we see a new form of "AI-optimization" (AIO) that replaces SEO?
Furthermore, the "hallucination" problem highlighted by the platform serves as a warning. If we rely on these models to tell us who is important, who is credible, and who is worth knowing, we are tethering our perception of reality to the hallucinations and biases of a black-box system.
Ultimately, In the Weights is a mirror held up to our own vanity. It suggests that our quest for immortality has evolved from building monuments of stone or writing books to seeking a place in the latent space of a super-intelligence. Whether or not being "in the weights" actually matters remains an open question, but for a generation increasingly defined by its digital presence, the desire to be "known" by the machine is proving to be a powerful, and perhaps inescapable, human impulse.
As the site continues to evolve, adding new models and refining its metrics, it stands as a testament to our changing relationship with knowledge. We are no longer searching for answers; we are asking the answer to remember us. And for now, that seems to be enough.
