It starts as a joke: if ElevenLabs does voice AI and TwelveLabs does video AI, what comes next? The author, a CMU student who goes by quantumish, googled “thirteenlabs” and found an AI-for-3D-scenery startup. Then “fourteenlabs” — another one. So he did the only sensible thing and catalogued the whole pattern.
The result is a tour of every “number + Labs” company from 0 to 99, with AI-related ones flagged:
- Almost every integer has at least one “N Labs” startup attached to it, many with .ai domains and near-identical product pages
- The chain runs from ElevenLabs (voice) and TwelveLabs (video) all the way up to the nineties
- His criteria: some online presence, “labs” before or after the number, and where several companies share a number, the one that looks most like ElevenLabs
The essay’s real content is the questions it leaves open: are founders independently converging on the same name, or copying the winner? Why are the seventies so densely packed with labs? And is “68labs” a real brand or a bet that the AI wave lifts every boat with “labs” in its name?
There’s a gem buried in the sameness: seventyonelab.com, a deliberately retro page that politely asks you to view it in Netscape 4 or IE 5 — proof that not everyone in the gold rush is trying to look identical.
It’s a light read, but it captures something real about the current AI moment: when every company wants to be an AI company, even the names become a commodity.