ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs, …You may have heard of the speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Recently a friend mentioned they knew someone who worked at a company called TwelveLabs that does AI for video (it feels like it must have been intended to play on the fact that ElevenLabs does audio, but I don’t know for sure). Jokingly, I googled “thirteenlabs” and was surprised to find an AI for 3D scenery project. I googled “fourteenlabs”. Another AI startup…?? How far does this go?

ElevenLabs、TwelveLabs、ThirteenLabs……你可能听说过语音合成公司 ElevenLabs。最近，一位朋友提到他们认识的人在一家名为 TwelveLabs 的公司工作，该公司专注于视频 AI（感觉这名字似乎是为了呼应 ElevenLabs 在音频领域的地位，但我并不确定）。我开玩笑地谷歌了一下“thirteenlabs”，惊讶地发现它竟然是一个 3D 场景 AI 项目。我又搜了“fourteenlabs”，结果又是另一家 AI 初创公司……？？这到底要排到多少？

Numbers 0-99 annotated with links to companies using it + “labs” as their name. A link has a background if the company is AI-related.

（此处为 0-99 的数字列表，标注了以“数字 + labs”命名的公司链接。如果该公司与 AI 相关，链接会有背景色。）

My loose criteria: The company must have some online presence (not necessarily a website, but usually one). The word “labs” (or sometimes “lab”) must either go after or before the number (spelled or numeric). There’s plenty of companies named after a number - what I’m after is the weird trend of number + “labs”. If there were multiple, I picked the one that was most similar to ElevenLabs (and thus more likely to have gotten the name inspiration from there?).

我的筛选标准比较宽松：该公司必须有一定的在线存在感（不一定是网站，但通常会有）。“labs”（有时是“lab”）一词必须位于数字（拼写或数字形式）之前或之后。以数字命名的公司有很多，但我关注的是这种“数字 + labs”的奇怪趋势。如果存在多家公司，我会选择与 ElevenLabs 最相似的那一家（因此更有可能受到其名称启发）。

Every company sort of wants to be an AI company now, so it’s hard to definitely say what companies are AI related. I marked it if the domain had a .ai TLD or if all of their main products involved AI in a central capacity. This really just raised more questions than answers. Why is this such a popular naming scheme? Are people independently arriving at this naming scheme? Why call your AI startup “68labs”? Why are the seventies so much more dense than the rest of the higher numbers? Also, I’m tempted to speculatively buy up domains like “twentyfivelabs” or “thirtytwolabs”…

现在每家公司似乎都想成为 AI 公司，所以很难明确界定哪些公司属于 AI 相关。如果域名带有 .ai 后缀，或者其所有核心产品都以 AI 为中心，我就会将其标记出来。这实际上引发了更多问题而非答案：为什么这种命名方案如此流行？人们是独立想到这种命名方式的吗？为什么要给你的 AI 初创公司起名“68labs”？为什么 70 多号段比其他高位数字更密集？另外，我甚至想去抢注像“twentyfivelabs”或“thirtytwolabs”这样的域名……

One fun discovery: among all the incredibly same-y startup websites, there is seventyonelab.com. Alongside the usual “all rights reserved” text, it politely informs you it is best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+.

Amazing. It looks like a design/webdev portfolio from the early 2000s and is full of fun little sites. I particularly like the aesthetic of the landing page and the other versions of it in the “little project” section. They sort of remind me of what I recently heard referred to as the “vectorheart” aesthetic (like what you’d see on 2000s IDM album covers!).

太神奇了。它看起来就像 2000 年代初的设计/网页开发作品集，充满了各种有趣的小站点。我特别喜欢它的着陆页美学，以及“小项目”部分的其他版本。它们让我想起了最近听到的所谓“矢量之心”（vectorheart）美学（就像你在 2000 年代 IDM 专辑封面上看到的那种风格！）。