You may have heard of the speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Recently a friend mentioned they knew someone at TwelveLabs that does AI for video. Jokingly, I googled "thirteenlabs" and was surprised to find an AI for 3D scenery project. How far does this go? I mapped numbers 0-99 annotated with links to companies using "[Number]labs". My loose criteria required an online presence and the number paired with "lab(s)". I marked them AI-related if they used a .ai TLD or centered products around AI.

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.

One fun discovery: among all the incredibly same-y startup websites, there is seventyonelab.com. Alongside the usual text, it politely informs you it is best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+. It looks like a design portfolio from the early 2000s and is full of fun little sites. They sort of remind me of the "vectorheart" aesthetic.