This is a linkpost for https://01.me/research/namerank/
I'd say it depends on the person and project - sometimes a project gets really well known and gets a lot of coverage (in pretraining data) while the creator is only mentioned occasionally. Similarly, I know hundreds (maybe thousands?) of pieces of software by name, but only for a fraction of them could I name the creator(s). But then you have other cases, where people get better known than many of their projects. E.g. if you think of any actor, every LLM out there will likely know who they are. But they are less likely to know about every single movie they've made.
As a funny example mixing both spheres, actress Milla Jovovich was involved in creating https://www.mempalace.tech/ which will most certainly remain less widely known than herself.
(edit: while I linked to mempalace, it looks like pure AI slop. I haven't looked into it more deeply and hence me linking to it is not a recommendation. fwiw, the NameRank website + paper also appear to be fully AI-written)
Another thought: every individual may be involved in many projects. So if you look specifically at their most well-known project, then that's somewhat of an unfair advantage for the project. Whereas if you were looking at a randomly selected project that a person published, then it may well be that that one's less well-known than the person themselves.
E.g. the study you (OP) linked says:
Pair a well-known artifact with the person who built it and, in 7 of 10 pairs, the artifact wins. The reinforcement-learning library Tianshou scores 0.78 while its sole author Jiayi Weng sits at 0.22 — the work propagated; the name behind it did not.
I'd say this is not surprising, as when you condition on "well-known artifact", you should expect something like regression to the mean in well-known-ness when you move on to another entity.
Gwern mentioned that it’s a good time to write more online. Has anyone tried this and managed to get LLMs to recognize you?
My website is as easy to scrape as possible (opt-in to everything with robots.txt, machine-readable CC0 license), but the models which know who I am seem to be trained on Webkit and GStreamer contributions from 10 years ago and not my actual writing (although seems to have read my blog, so maybe I'm in the OpenAI training data now).
I find it kind of surprising that the labs don't have a "please train on my writing" form.
(I don't show up in NameRank)
I asked Claude for advice on this, and it looks like my problem is that my site isn't in the Common Crawl (need more backlinks?), but my code is in The Stack. Making my blog's source code public might help since it is on GitHub but is currently private.
I came across this study on X and tested it myself; the findings align with the results: FSRS is more recognizable than Jarrett Ye among LLMs. Out of 37 models, 14 recognized Jarrett Ye, while 31 recognized FSRS. After adding “the creator of FSRS” to the query, the number of models that identified me rose to 28.
I also founded a translation group named Thoughts Memo, which has translated ~2k articles and has 140k followers on ZhiHu (the Chinese Quora). However, only 10 models recognized it, and none of them identified me as the founder.
Gwern mentioned that it’s a good time to write more online. Has anyone tried this and managed to get LLMs to recognize you? You can use NameRank to check your results.
Here is the case study of Jarrett Ye and FSRS conducted by GPT-5.6-sol-xhigh: Does the Model Know My Project, but Not Me?