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。

最近的一场 Hacker News 讨论指出，受 ElevenLabs 和 TwelveLabs 等公司的影响，AI 初创公司正掀起一股以“[数字] Labs”作为命名惯例的趋势。评论者观察到，这种通常涉及任意数字的命名方式已成为 AI 企业的“样板化”潮流，类似于过去在初创公司名称后添加“-ify”或“-ly”的命名风尚。尽管部分参与者认为这些名称具有抽象或“易记”的特点，但也有人批评其平庸、缺乏创意，或是“流水线式创业”的体现。讨论涉及以下几个主题： * **“Labs”生态：** 许多用户调侃可用数字的匮乏，一些参与者指出，几乎每一个整数域名都被开发者或域名投资者抢注了。 * **行业历史：** 早期消费级 AI 领域的资深人士将当前景观与 15.ai 和 FakeYou 时代进行了对比，指出虽然品牌命名转向了正式的“Labs”，但风险投资、快速迭代和平台转型等底层逻辑依然如故。 * **设计套路：** 社区分析了“AI 美学”，指出许多此类网站采用了惊人相似的落地页模板和 Logo，一些人将其戏称为“VectorHeart”。

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!).