ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs
ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

原始链接: https://quantumi.sh/public/labs.html

受人工智能音频公司 ElevenLabs 的启发，作者调查了科技行业中一种独特的趋势：初创公司名称采用“数字 + Labs”的格式（例如 TwelveLabs、ThirteenLabs）。作者整理了一份名称中包含“labs”且编号在 0 到 99 之间的公司名单，并重点标注了其中在人工智能领域运营的公司。研究发现，这类名称非常密集，尤其是在 70 到 80 之间的编号段。这引发了一个疑问：这究竟是有意为之的行业命名趋势，还是仅仅是一系列独立的巧合？除了现代人工智能初创公司品牌普遍存在的同质化和重复性外，搜索过程还带来了一个怀旧的发现：`seventyonelab.com`。与当代的网站不同，该网站保留了 21 世纪初那种迷人的“矢量之心”（vectorheart）美学风格，并附带了一条“建议在 Netscape 4.0 浏览器中获得最佳浏览效果”的免责声明。文章最后幽默地探讨了投机性域名抢注的问题，并对比了当今人工智能初创公司单调、统一的品牌形象与过去充满创意的网页设计。

最近，Hacker News 上的一篇讨论贴幽默地探讨了初创公司命名中“数字+Labs”泛滥的现象，这一趋势始于 ElevenLabs、TwelveLabs 和 ThirteenLabs。用户们调侃这种可预测的命名方式，将其比作电影《我为玛丽狂》（There’s Something About Mary）中“7分钟腹肌”的经典桥段，以此讽刺这种增量式命名的荒谬感。评论者们打趣地讨论了剩余数字组合的可用性、未来潜在的命名趋势（如区号），以及初创公司品牌推广套路的循环性。总的来说，社区将“Labs”序列视为风险投资领域的“FizzBuzz”编程测试，许多人冷峻地指出，这种趋势将会持续下去，直到有人不可避免地想出类似“Zen-Eleven”这样的组合。

原文

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?

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.

My loose criteria

The company must have some online presence (not necessarily a website, but usually one).
The word "labs" (or somtimes "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?).
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"…

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!).