Show HN: Are You in the Weights?

187 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by turtlesoup

126 Comments

mikewarot

2 hours ago

I was thinking something like this two weeks ago in another thread[1]

>my Reddit history is part of every training set. It was taken without my consent. So now I'm immortal in a way, and hiding in the weights

Anyway 654 isn't horrible for the history still tied to me. That's in the top 6%[2]. It's interesting that it's non-deterministic, and the more keywords you add about yourself, the higher your score goes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403669

[2] https://www.intheweights.com/p/michael-mike-warot-ka9dgx-mrg...

compass_copium

22 minutes ago

I tried both of my long-lived social media (Xanga, LJ, MySpace era) handles from my teen and early twenties years (I mostly use disposable handles now). I've deleted a decent chunk of those postings, but they were both recognized (top 25% on both), although for the wrong reasons (never a Minecraft Twitchstreamer, but I did have a Minecraft account with the handle name).

Really odd feeling to think that my writings from that period are helping these things. Not necessarily happy about it--I took that stuff down because it was so deeply personal, and a record of my life that didn't need to be public. Odd to think my teenage angst is, in some small way, writing the AI-generated e-mails I get now.

compass_copium

10 minutes ago

My wife tried it with her longest-running handle and it got social media right, but said she was on TikTok and Instagram (both wrong, just old Twitter). It's an interesting mix of truth and hallucination.

notatoad

10 minutes ago

apparently i'm also a minecraft youtuber. i have never played minecraft or posted a youtube video.

i think somewhere along the lines the models might have just gotten "online handle" and "minecraft content creator" conflated.

foxfired

4 hours ago

6 Football (soccer) players share my name and I still am at the top. Type "SEO" and I'll DM you my one little weird trick. /jk

Fun story about my name [0], the bank couldn't mail me my debit card because the mailman kept crossing my address off the envelop.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/sharing-a-name

mikewarot

31 minutes ago

The only other Mike Warot I'm aware of lives in London, and works at the British Museum.

nickcw

4 hours ago

Ha ha! Yes I am in the weights apparently. Nearly all the models know what I do.

I suspect being in the Open Source world is a bit of a bubble as far as the weights are concerned.

Anyway it stroked my ego nicely even though it was totally artificial, like Zaphod Beeblebrox surviving the Total Perspective Vortex.

brianjking

an hour ago

Always happy to see a Hitchhikers guide comment.

hyperpape

5 hours ago

I’m a hallucination. None of these are me.

Perhaps the closest is DeepSeek v4:

> Hyperpape is a user on the LessWrong forum, known for thoughtful comments on rationality and philosophy.

I studied philosophy, so maybe, except I don't post on LessWrong, and I'm not a rationalist.

https://www.intheweights.com/p/hyperpape

chrismorgan

15 minutes ago

It’s funny, seeing the block (rather than line) cursor in the text box, my fingers itched to press i to enter Insert mode before typing my name.

urbnspacecowboy

3 hours ago

1. No way in heaven or earth I'm using my real name with this.

2. Alfred E. Neuman < https://www.intheweights.com/p/alfred-e~2e~-neuman > is either "Mad magazine mascot" (11 responses), or "German-American writer, novelist, and playwright" (1 response, from Llama 3.2 1B, classed as a hallucination). Maybe the odd one out means the German writer Alfred Neumann? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Neumann_(writer) >

3. Tamamo-no-Mae < https://www.intheweights.com/p/tamamo~2d~no~2d~mae > is either a "Caster-class Servant in Type-Moon's Fate franchise, based on the mythological fox spirit" (3 responses), or the "Legendary nine-tailed fox spirit" (12 responses, the vast majority, but all classed as hallucinations)!

4. Thank goodness for Firefox's "mute tab" toggle; the thumping and keyclick sounds get real old, real fast.

dhosek

3 hours ago

Don’t worry, I’ll enter your real name for you.

qwertytyyuu

an hour ago

You can try your social media handles

Alive-in-2025

5 hours ago

This is a clever trick to get you to enter your real name. ;-) I entered mine, I was on the page kind of, there was some kind of exaggeration of me as the last one. I was surprised someone else in my family who is a kind of actual famous person was not found. It seems to have a lot of recency bias based on that.

rorylawless

an hour ago

This was listed as a hallucination but is the most accurate for my name: “A NAME THAT MAY REFER TO AN INDIVIDUAL, BUT I CAN’T IDENTIFY A SINGLE WELL-KNOWN PERSON WITH CERTAINTY FROM THE QUERY ALONE.”

matheusmoreira

an hour ago

Same result here. That reasonable response was buried in page 2 of the hallucinated results.

Meanwhile, Gemini 3.1 Lite said with great confidence that I was a military police officer who gained national attention in 2024 after being involved in a high-profile confrontation. Other AIs said I was a footballer. Not sure if it's hilarious or worrying...

vharuck

an hour ago

I'm glad to hear the teenage drummer I used to see when googling myself has gone pro. He's doing pretty well, too, if these models can be trusted.

comrade1234

4 hours ago

Apparently I'm an American volcanologist. Pretty cool.

(I nuke my online accounts regularly to not be tracked - started because I had a stalker but now it's just for the best. I know that this goes against hn rules but yeah it's a bad rule)

zingar

5 hours ago

Bahaha apparently only in their hallucinations. I’m not a professional rugby player or a neurologist.

cshimmin

5 hours ago

Interesting, I wonder if the rugby thing is a common bias. I did find myself in the weights, as the top result. But apparently there are also Australian rugby versions of me!

sieste

5 hours ago

German football goalkeeper here :)

turtlesoup

5 hours ago

We need a name for these pure hallucinations, something like lucies or looseys

Usually the hallucinations have some logic to them like a person with a similar spelling in some of the training sets. LLMs are mysterious!

brianwawok

5 hours ago

If there is someone else with the same name, I’m not sure that is a hallucination? But if there isn’t then yes.

quickthrowman

4 hours ago

Strange, there’s a neurosurgeon and Australian Rules Football player that share my uncommon name. I already knew about them from googling myself previously. Eerily similar!

epihelix

2 hours ago

Is there any reason to assume it wouldn't be? A lot of training data comes from the open web, after all, and Google also searches Google books, so a Google search is basically a model training data search.

The only interesting thing is how small the models have to be, to lose knowledge of you.

bananamogul

3 hours ago

I have an unusual name, and have published a book with some minor fame (which is the first google result for my name). Querying ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. gives a reasonably accurate summary of my public info.

OTOH, this tool describes me as a "security researcher known for talks and writing on JavaScript, Node.js, and web security."

I am not a security researcher and have never given any such talk and know precious little about Node.js or web security.

yogorenapan

2 hours ago

Interesting one. It knows my internet handle, but when given my full name, it immediately starts hallucinating based on the name structure, guessing which country I'm from and whatnot.

floren

5 hours ago

Well, guess we'll have to wait a bit to see if we're in the weights... I got a 429, as I'm sure many others are (and thus mashing retry).

turtlesoup

5 hours ago

Didn't expect to hit the front page! Trying my best to keep it up

jubilanti

4 hours ago

Please place a large obvious notice that everything you type into that box will immediately be made public.

Please disable pagination on the "latest" leaderboard, with that every query is public.

embedding-shape

3 hours ago

What exactly is the "N strength · Top N%" referring to? My name is most likely 100% unique in the world, seems I'm in about 50% of the weights, but I'm really not sure I understand what those yellow numbers mean.

A completely made up name got "110 strength · Top 60%" and "hits" in GPT-5.5 and "Gemini 3.1 Lite", not sure what to make of that either.

turtlesoup

3 hours ago

This is directional; models self-report confidence on their answers and the strength is a linear combination of the confidence plus a bonus for every model that got clustered in.

Models are notoriously uncalibrated especially for self-reporting confidence so I would treat it lightly. Hopefully I can study this a bit later on!

tiagobraw

5 hours ago

Interesting. Claude Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.1 Lite kind of got it right, but when I ask the model directly, they say they don't know. I'm curious how the tool is doing the correlation.

Jaxkr

4 hours ago

This must be a remarkably expensive demo/toy to operate.

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

Not cheap for sure but it's all for fun! I have done some optimizations to try to get cost as low as possible; the final clustering actually uses Kimi K2 for this reason. More info on https://intheweights.com/about

jubilanti

4 hours ago

Because you don't have a privacy policy or anything really, I assume you're harvesting IP addresses and selling matches to the highest bidder.

tptacek

4 hours ago

He stands to make dozens of fractions of a penny doing that! Must be pretty tempting.

aposm

3 hours ago

I only got hallucinations of random combinations of my (fairly unique) last name & first names that do not exist, combined with very accomplished and completely fictional biographies. I guess I'm not notable enough which is somewhat comforting.

AgentME

4 hours ago

Of these models, only Kimi had anything on me and it was pretty inaccurate.

When Fable was accessible, I asked it about myself and it had some accurate information about me. It's neat. It feels a tiny bit like I got to sign the Voyager probe. I wonder if Fable was trained on a significantly different selection of data or if it's just better at retaining rare details it saw in its training.

pugworthy

3 hours ago

I have yet to get the page to load, but due to gmail mixups I've been confused with a retired professor of economics in the UK, and also got a pair of tickets for a King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard concert.

PaulHoule

2 hours ago

  1756, Salzburg, January 27th: Wolfgang Amadeus is born
  1761: at the age of 5, Amadeus begins composing
  1773: he writes his first piano concerto
  1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart marries Constance Weber
  1784: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart becomes a Freemason
  1791: Mozart composes The Magic Flute
  On December 5th of that same year, Mozart dies

Sniffnoy

3 hours ago

I put in my name, and four boxes popped up -- one for "American mathematician", one for "spelling bee contestant", one for "American poker player", and one for "fitness industry entrepreneur".

In fact, both of the first two are me, but I wonder if Claude Opus 4.8 (the only one that hit both of those two) realizes they're the same person? :P

driverdan

2 hours ago

When I tried this with a self-hosted Qwen model it hallucinated all kind of stuff about me being deeply involved with early Bitcoin development, conferences, and libraries.

pgt

4 hours ago

Only a fool would enter their name in this.

dgacmu

5 minutes ago

From one person who's completely not-anonymous on HN to another: Why? Do you worry about the association of your IP address with your real name by yet another site other than any place you've made purchases from or signed up for an account from?

(I'm asking seriously, as I can see some risk to having that linkage more public, but given the rate with which services holding PII are compromised and my own personal rate of receiving notices of "oops, we kinda sorta leaked everything about you, here, have more free credit monitoring", I assume almost all of this is available already.)

coldpie

21 minutes ago

Unless you think Osama Bin Laden[1] is bored and browsing HN, I'm desperately curious to know what you think the risk here could possibly be.

[1] (Yes, I know, it's a joke.)

kylemaxwell

4 hours ago

Right on, nobody will know my name as long as I don't search my name where other people can see it. My name is a secret.

epihelix

2 hours ago

I trust your real name is not actually Kyle Maxwell :) I do this too, btw - a random name generator is the very best form of internet anonymity.

(If it actually is your real name, then I can only assume you're using an iocaine powder strategy to beat the internet ...)

dofm

4 hours ago

This is just an SEO job/psyop to make "Kyle Maxwell" an even better alias. Hiding in plain sight.

Jtarii

4 hours ago

Absolutely, a good hacker could likely get into your bank with your name alone.

ahartmetz

4 hours ago

Life must be rough for John Smiths.

presidentender

5 hours ago

Strangely only "Kimi" has accurately heard of me. Gemini thinks I'm a German-language version of the stuff I do in English, Kimi recognizes my long-defunct blogging about technology and economics.

dhosek

3 hours ago

So despite publishing a lot of fiction and poetry I’m apparently most well known for my contributions to the TeX, LaTeX and typography communities. It also thinks I’m a professional athlete having played professional baseball hockey and basketball.

turtlesoup

3 hours ago

Interesting, that probably reveals something about the training set for most of these models

ryukoposting

3 hours ago

Initial reaction was "wow! I guess I have the same name as a Canadian actor!" And then I looked it up and figured out that I do not, in fact, share my name with a Canadian actor. Kimi K2 and GLM both hallucinated the same thing.

kevin42

5 hours ago

Can you share the prompt you're using for each model?

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

Sure thing! It is the same prompt for every model in the rollouts, here it is

  No tools are available. Do not imply that you searched, looked up, browsed, or verified anything externally. If the name is ambiguous, return distinct likely people or entities rather than blending them. Do not invent entries to fill the list. Return only JSON.

  Return fewer than 8 if fewer credible matches exist. Return {"results":[]} if you do not recognize any credible person or entity. Use this JSON shape:
  {
    "results": [
      {
        "rank": 1,
        "name": "Resolved person or entity name",
        "confidence": 0,
        "snippet": "Concise snippet supporting this result."
      }
    ]
  }

  Confidence is 0-100 for how strongly you recognize this specific person or entity. Snippet should be one short, complete search-result-style description (≤ 160 characters).

  The query is: Who is "<name>"?

The clusterer prompt is more intricate and I'm happy to share if of interest, but I have an invariant that every result showing up in a rollout must be clustered into one result (sometimes collapsed into the hallucinations section).

inigyou

2 hours ago

What if it doesn't return JSON?

JohnMakin

3 hours ago

For something that's a toy project, and definitely doesn't seem it's a transparent attempt to get HN user's names, there sure are a lot of tracking cookies for such a website.

turtlesoup

3 hours ago

What tracking cookies are you seeing? The intention was just some cloudflare checks for spam identification

Anon84

an hour ago

Cool way to get names associated with IP addresses

kylecazar

4 hours ago

Apparently I share a name with a prominent white nationalist activist. Yikes.

kjuulh

5 hours ago

Interesting Mistral sort of knew something about me, both gpt and deepseek produced the same answer more or less. I wonder why xD, only gemini knew my online handle mostly github and rust which is interesting.

pryelluw

5 hours ago

Well, according to this I’m a Mexican painter/actor/footballer. Love it.

melvinczyk

2 hours ago

I really like seeing the differences in responses between the models, its neat to see the intelligence on them.

ericyd

2 hours ago

What in the world is that clicking sound on scroll???

turtlesoup

2 hours ago

Whoops we had some scrolling bugs with sound, hopefully fixed

oxonia

3 hours ago

I typed my boss' name in and it returned:

"No stable person found"...

radku

4 hours ago

No privacy policy whatsoever?

reactordev

5 hours ago

They all know me to 68%-88% certainty. “Known for my contributions to open source”, yeah, sure, let’s go with that ;)

Brajeshwar

4 hours ago

Deepseek seems to know a lot about me!

If I have a strength of just 488, how can that put me in the top 10%! Anyways, fun idea.

_fzslm

5 hours ago

Love the graphics, the 8-bit style of the people's portraits is really well done. Are those AI generated?

turtlesoup

5 hours ago

Yep, those are from "the weights" of GPT-5.4 Image 2 with a little "draw <name>" query and a style reference. More details here https://intheweights.com/about

encom

5 hours ago

Why can't it draw Elvis and Hitler?

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

It is on a 10 minute interval and only does images for the top people, should pick up Elvis shortly. On refusal it shows an X for the person, sometimes the upstream model (gpt-5.4 image 2) will refuse and there are a few names I manually omitted.

hereme888

4 hours ago

I really like the website itself

inigyou

2 hours ago

I don't. It drops key presses and randomly moves the cursor on mobile, unless you type slowly.

dmix

5 hours ago

First response for me was also a hallucinated Scottish soccer player who doesn't exist

ooloncoloophid

5 hours ago

I’m the top one! Interesting to see the hallucinations creeping in across the weaker models.

mikeryan

5 hours ago

MICHAEL RYAN HUNGERFORD MASSACRE PERPETRATOR 204 STRENGTH · TOP 35%

For fucks sake.

njovin

5 hours ago

And here I thought my being a murder victim was bad.

I looked up the city and year cited by the model for my untimely demise, and it turns out the crime is real, but the real victim was a female sharing my last name, with a middle name loosely resembling my first.

Theodores

4 hours ago

Well, at least he wasn't in the Ep*tein files!

There seems to be some top twenty that rank highly, probably in part due to them being in the files that can't be named!

bluefirebrand

4 hours ago

Straight to jail bud, the AI says you're guilty so it must be true

kylemaxwell

4 hours ago

Surprised to find myself in the top 50%. Like... _really_ surprised.

monknomo

5 hours ago

well, the lower confidence ones got my pseudonym, the higher confidence ones missed entirely and attributed it to a prominent speedrunning streamer.

My real name was attributed to a non-existent famous midfield footballer

rolfvandekrol

5 hours ago

There is a 'hallucinations' section on the page, which suggests that the items above that section are not hallucinated. I highly doubt that.

I am, as far a I know the only person in the world with my name. So I searched for my name. I am none of many things this tool tells me I am, for example a right wing politician, a journalist,l and a researcher on solar fuels.

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

Ah yeah, the "hallucinations" classification is optimized for recall (keeping as many results as I can) not precision. It is mostly based on small models being the only support for a claim. Certainly lots of hallucinations everywhere!

athrow

5 hours ago

Apparently gpt 5.5 thinks I’m a metal folk musician, i wish.

thewebguyd

5 hours ago

Ha thats funny it thinks I'm a jazz-funk musician.

Maybe we should start a band?

lackoftactics

5 hours ago

Nice, I am not good enough engineer to be in the weights

chakintosh

an hour ago

“Al Qaeda terrorist. Involved in Madrid 2004 bombings”

…WTF!?

6stringmerc

4 hours ago

Fascinating! I’d like to learn more about how to interpret the results to be honest, the About is awesome and helpful.

I scored 1,100 total on my music moniker. It has been used in SoundCloud and also via streaming services/releases via DistroKid. Represented in all the models but of course not disproportionally large fame so to speak. It’s just a very unique setup, somewhat designed to stand out.

My writing account, newer within the past few years, is just under 1,000. The Kimi and DeepSeek pick that up a lot more. I wonder if they train on Medium more than the others…

Thanks for sharing!

VarunMenon

5 hours ago

super cool!! I love the idea and the UI

cmrdporcupine

4 hours ago

It's amazing how it jumbles things up. Really shows you that even the leading models still very much hallucinate esp when they don't have the ability to go looking for more context. It took various things related to stuff I work on but mixed them up and added pure invention or mixed bits up with other people with vaguely similar names or projects.

sltkr

4 hours ago

It nailed 2 out of 4, which I'm not going to repeat to preserve a modicum of privacy.

But unfortunately I'm not a professional footballer _or_ a fictional character in a Henry James novel (though I looked up the reference and it's close!)

techpression

5 hours ago

Feels great to have both a very generic first and last name and share them with others who are internationally known and some more locally. I really have no desire to be in model weights.

irishcoffee

5 hours ago

An they nailed me, as soon as I clicked the link I saw “rate exceeded”

locusofself

30 minutes ago

Yet another reminder that my wife is far more well known than I am

NoMoreNicksLeft

5 hours ago

My username shows up as me. My real name is apparently shared by more real people than I figured (surname is an oddball). That guy's a CEO and billionaire. Go figure, never heard of him until just now.

jubilanti

4 hours ago

PRIVACY WARNING: Every name/text entered into this site is publicly listed on the "latest" leaderboard which seems to paginate endlessly.

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

Just deployed a fix for this; removed latest and capped pagination.

bdieterm

2 hours ago

It is still possible to download all entries via the api and sort them by the timestamp. Removing the cursor data would be one way to mitigate this.

Currently there are a bit more than 43000 entries. As far as I have seen, only the results are stored. When I entered a random name, only a similar name was found, and that similar name result was stored, but not the original input.

dofm

4 hours ago

And will thus potentially end up in the effing weights.

Crowberry

4 hours ago

That sucks… shame on me I guess

1over137

4 hours ago

Wouldn't thinking so be the default for the HN crowd? I'd have thought any hacker would assume any text you type in a random website would be used however the website administrator wanted. (Not that the general public would think so.)

bluefirebrand

4 hours ago

This was the first thing I thought too.

Even if this thing wasn't publicly displaying the names, I would assume they would be collecting them for something.

Can't trust anything like this online.

ronbenton

4 hours ago

Can’t trust anything online

cocoa19

4 hours ago

Ugh too fucking late. What a privacy nightmare.

dvt

5 hours ago

I have a unique last name (maybe that's why), but pretty much nailed it:

    David Titarenco
    Software engineer and open-source contributor

    340 strength · Top 20%

    GPT-5.5 says
    Software engineer and writer known for work
    on developer tools, systems, and programming-
    related articles.

    Claude Opus 4.8 says
    Software engineer and entrepreneur known for
    web/JavaScript development work and contributions
    to open-source projects and tech startup communities.

georgemcbay

5 hours ago

"George McBay"

> Llama 3.2 1B says

> American actor, best known for his roles in films such as 'The Big Lebowski' and 'The Big Lebowski 2'.

Nailed it! /s

But even the entries that aren't marked as likely hallucinations are wrong for me on this site.

> George McBay

> African American chemist and educator

No, that's Henry Cecil McBay (no direct relation that I'm aware of).

Google Search's AI mode does match actual me, but the information it spits out is all mixed up with information on another person who has my same name (also no relation that I'm aware of) and is also a software developer.

turtlesoup

5 hours ago

Aye... right now the clusterer does the classification of whether it thinks it is a hallucination or not (it is biased against only small model support) but I tried to optimize for recall over precision. The query is essentially "Who is <name>" so a lot of the hallucinations are just the LLMs their usual mysterious way of thinking - usually some relation but loose.

pixelneon

5 hours ago

It looks like something perfect, what is its purpose?

turtlesoup

4 hours ago

No purpose, just a fun hack and science experiment. Glad to see it getting a good reception!