Anyone who has googled recently knows it’s not quite what it used to be. Sure, it’s all happening with Google search itself, but there’s also an inevitable sense that web search isn’t the regular source of information it used to be, with just as many people learning about who you and I might be from chatbots.
Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn had a similar feeling, which led to their creation In Vari. These “weights” are the numerical parameters that shape the training and performance of an AI model, so the site he claims to measure how well “a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.”
“Being in the weights means that your existence was considered important in the process of creating superhuman artificial intelligence,” the site says.
To achieve this, In the Weights is supposed to ask different models (including Grok, Gemini, multiple versions of GPT, Claude and Llama, as well as lesser-known models) with a question similar to: “Who is the <όνομα>; Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence.” Then “cluster[s] similar descriptions together and assign[s] power rating’.
For example, this humble tech blogger received a power score of 641, placing me in the top 6% of names. I was feeling pretty good until I saw it multiple TechCrunch colleagues scored even higher. And the scoreboard is changing as I write this post, with “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin currently in first place with a power rating of 988, with opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.
The results also show which models returned which answers for a particular name, and highlight possible hallucinations — apparently GPT-5.4 Mini says that Anthony Ha is an “ambiguous name form that could refer to multiple people with the initials AHA.”
Asked why he created In the Weights, Dimson told TechCrunch via email that he and Flynn were trying to “get the creative juices flowing again” after leaving OpenAI (which they both joined through the acquisition of design startup Global Illumination).
Dimson said he was thinking about how “Google vanity searches are the wrong target in 2026 as more traffic moves to LLMs” and the fact that “so many lives are somehow encoded in a bunch of floating point numbers inside the AI brain”. He also said that the direction of the site was “sealed” by a language blog post riffs on AI weights and Terry Bisson’s classic narration “They are made of meat.”
“The reception has been crazy so far, we thought this would be a mild curiosity, but it seems to have struck a nerve of wanting to see if you live forever in superintelligence (the comparison factor doesn’t hurt either!)” added Dimson.
While I’m not so convinced that being “remembered” by a chatbot is a guaranteed ticket to immortality, I can’t deny that I find the results both interesting and envy-inducing, especially since they’re encoded in an easy-to-compare score. (AI reviewer Anthony Moser was mocked that this is “literally the same as asking 13 chatbots to tell you about yourself.”) Also helping: The fact that the site features a cute, Inspired by Nintendo retro design.
Dimson said he plans to further investigate why different models of the same series give different results, which models are biased toward different types of people, and which people “should have a Wikipedia article but don’t.”
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