> 52 1ab (Pronounced 52 Lab) is a Software Research group dedicated to interoperabilty research in India. It is named after the Section 52(1) (ab) of The Copyright Act which states:
>> The following act shall not constitute an infringement of copyright:
>> the doing of any act necessary to obtain information essential for operating inter-operability of an independently created computer programme with other programmes by a lawful possessor of a computer programme provided that such information is not otherwise readily available.
I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.
From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.
ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.
The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.
I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.
Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.
For context, 15 was some brony tf2 player who cracked deep voice synthesis in order to make My Little Pony characters say funny things. He then offered this for free on his site. It was never a clever branding thing, it was just his username.
It's funny seeing HN types being genuinely confused as to why someone would just make interesting things for the sake of making them, and then offer them freely for the good of others. He used to be on HN, there's good insights in his posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=15ai
Thanks for sharing. It is a classic. HN has only seemingly changed in that there seems to be more of those ‘types’ than ever. The TF2 community has always been a creative bastion too.
Oh man, this is a blast from the past. Played TF2 with him a few times, he hasn't been online on Steam for a long time, but apparently he just left AI behind before it turned into the dystopian techbro circlejerk it is now, and still continues to work on other things he likes today, which is great to hear.
It does feel like the "hacker" part of Hacker News is all but gone at this point, the only thing people are trying to "hack" anymore is their bank account balance. I will remember 15.ai as a landmark from the tail-end of the "people doing cool things just for the sake of doing them and showing it to others" era of the internet.
^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it.
More story:
ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.
Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.
I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.
A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.
15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.
ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.
Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.
>It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product
Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.
This world of cheap (vc) money, huge private equity sells and high revenue early in the products development phase is so distant to me(geographically and even more so, mentally), I need some help deciding what to do with my project and I'd really appreciate if you could DM me
Why would people use Fish instead of e.g. ElevenLabs? (I was a heavy TTS user in previous job, but we generally went with one of the "major" providers (11labs, PlayHT when they were still around), not any of the "new players".)
Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.
I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.
But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.
My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.
We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)
It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.
ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.
Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.
Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.
I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.
I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.
A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
I was trying to remember the actor/comedian who delivered this pitch. It was Harland Williams. I most remember him as the Pennsylvania state trooper from Dumb & Dumber.
I think it’s similar to the reasoning behind HN stripping numbers from clickbait headlines. Numbers feel salient even when they represent nothing at all, because numbers are used universally in every field of human study and endeavor. Unlike field-specific jargon.
Wow, haha I just created an LLC that is a "<number> Labs" company. I don't plan on raising VC or anything public with it, it's just a name to release apps on the app store under.
I was trying to come up with a name and it was exhausting, everything was taken, I was trying "clever names", eventually after strategizing with ChatGPT it gave me the suggestion along the lines of:
"Many people just use their initials, birthdate, or area code, plus the word 'software', 'tech', or 'labs'"
I got lucky when registering an LLC last year for some contract work because despite having a relatively common first and last name, no one had named an nLLC that in my (very large) city. At some point during the process, I had to pick an officer title for myself for some paperwork, but there didn't seem to be any guidelines or restrictions on them, so I just put down my name for that too; I figured that being Firstname Lastname of Firstname Lastname LLC is probably even more clear than "CEO" since it makes it even more obvious that I'm the only one in it.
At this point, naming conventions in AI startups are starting to read like a sequence counting exercise. Focus on core API reliability over branding gimmicks.
Maybe soon they’ll be effectively disposable enough to start using the naming strategies of Chinese Amazon resellers of generic crap. Like “The mission statement of GLUFDRAWNBY labs is…”
Haha, spot on! Next thing you know we’ll be using GLUFDRAWNBY-3.5-Turbo for production. Keyboard mash brand names were bound to cross into tech eventually.
> 6.90 CHF - locks your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and mouse and shows a black screen while you clean. Free 7-day trial.
> 4.90 CHF - opens macOS's color loupe on any pixel on screen and instantly copies its HEX, RGB or HSL code to the clipboard. History of your last 8 colors, with a real magnifier that zooms into pixels. Free 7-day trial.
That's weird that the more techy thing is cheaper.
Both of those are actually built-in but very poorly documented (or basically undocumented). Disable keyboard for cleaning : https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/448938 and for the color picker MacOS has "Digital Color Meter.app" preinstalled when its window has the focus hover anywhere on screen and use cmd+shift+c to copy the value (by default it uses RGB but in the View menu you can change it to hexadecimal, the values are then copied as HTML #)
A long time ago I used "23 Labs" as a funny name relative to my username. Fast forward many years and I considered actually using it. Apparently "[Number] Labs" is a very popular idea now...
Fwiw, ElevenLabs doesn't even make any sense as a firm, considering its TTS offering is extremely overpriced by an absurdly large factor. A large user would be far better off using local models. Even the OpenAI TTS is cheaper. There is no moat here such as with hardware.
11labs does _way_ more than basic TTS. The options, customizability, quality of voice cloning (for editing your own voices), etc is far more than what you see on the surface.
If you wanna hook up a voice agent to Twilio for support for example, 11labs is probably one of the quickest and least painful ways to integrate while still maintaining control over your agent and behaviors.
Yes you can vibe code your own glue code, but try that in a large enterprise where you have to consider your team now taking on perpetual maintenance; and not having a vendor/SLA to just send tickets to when something breaks (or you want something new).
The moat is marketing and good looking UI. They have been spamming Tik Tok et al. relentlessly and every lazy opportunist algorithm exploiter out there knows who they are, what they do, and that they can easily generate enough slop per cost to make their money back. So yeah, not a moat, but you're kinda missing the point. Just like Lovable is wildly over-priced, under powered, and has crazy levels of lock in built in (you can't even access your own supabase account that it uses for backend). It's not for you / us. Its for the masses who don't know (or want to know) any better.
Back around 1994, I was 22 and had just moved away from my parents' home. I was renting a room in a 3BR house with roommates. We had pastimes like dancing to Deee-Lite, playing TinyMUD, and playing DOOM on a null modem connection with my 386. It turned out that one roommate had pastimes involving a pump shotgun he stored under his bed. But anyways.
I was eager, and knowledgeable enough, to register a unique domain name for the entire household. It wasn't clear how we'd use it, with no permanent Internet presence, and we didn't have any hosting, DNS, or BGP capabilities, but a domain name sure seemed like a nifty thing to have, and it was free. So I aimed to register under .ca.us.
Perhaps I was not feeling creative enough that week, or it was quite difficult to capture the zeitgeist of four completely different college kids sharing a house, but I decided that the best name for us was <street address>-<street name>.san-diego.ca.us. Fictitious example: 1234-main.san-diego.ca.us.
Another curiosity about this particular name was that it may have been on the cusp of standards compliance. In the original DNS specification, a label could not begin with a digit, mainly because of parsing from bare IP addresses, but as you can see, eventually it was permitted, and our domain registration went forward.
It was a real bummer, though, because our household domain name languished, as I argued with my roommates, and we had no means of even setting up email addresses, but for a few shining years I did own a wacky, unique, but very generic street-address-based domain name.
> 52 1ab (Pronounced 52 Lab) is a Software Research group dedicated to interoperabilty research in India. It is named after the Section 52(1) (ab) of The Copyright Act which states:
>> The following act shall not constitute an infringement of copyright:
>> the doing of any act necessary to obtain information essential for operating inter-operability of an independently created computer programme with other programmes by a lawful possessor of a computer programme provided that such information is not otherwise readily available.
I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.
From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.
in any case, pretty much all of those sites look like boilerplate vibe-coded startup templates.
[0] https://41labs.ai/logo-nav.png?v=2
> Twelve Labs and ElevenLabs are co-hosting the 23Labs Hackathon
ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.
The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.
I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.
Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.
It's funny seeing HN types being genuinely confused as to why someone would just make interesting things for the sake of making them, and then offer them freely for the good of others. He used to be on HN, there's good insights in his posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=15ai
It does feel like the "hacker" part of Hacker News is all but gone at this point, the only thing people are trying to "hack" anymore is their bank account balance. I will remember 15.ai as a landmark from the tail-end of the "people doing cool things just for the sake of doing them and showing it to others" era of the internet.
More story:
ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche.
Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds.
I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart.
A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits.
15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too.
ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill.
Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.
Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.
His users convinced him to close 15.ai, so it's unlikely the model will ever see the light of day.
There are thankfully a lot of high quality open source TTS models now.
I launched as vo.codes (and two prior names) before 2020 and later rebranded to FakeYou.
https://thenextweb.com/news/celebrity-voices-deepfake-ai-app
Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.
I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.
But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.
My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.
I'm working on https://getartcraft.com which is open source:
https://github.com/storytold/artcraft
We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.)
It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth.
ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open.
https://artcraftx.ai/
Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust.
Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them.
I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too.
I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly.
A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.
(I'm not affiliated with this company and know nothing about it)
[0] https://youtu.be/IijpmHlGzXA?si=bELHeYmcwk6L6Jpi
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
from There's Something About Mary
I was trying to come up with a name and it was exhausting, everything was taken, I was trying "clever names", eventually after strategizing with ChatGPT it gave me the suggestion along the lines of:
"Many people just use their initials, birthdate, or area code, plus the word 'software', 'tech', or 'labs'"
And I went ahead with that and called it a day!
> 6.90 CHF - locks your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and mouse and shows a black screen while you clean. Free 7-day trial.
> 4.90 CHF - opens macOS's color loupe on any pixel on screen and instantly copies its HEX, RGB or HSL code to the clipboard. History of your last 8 colors, with a real magnifier that zooms into pixels. Free 7-day trial.
That's weird that the more techy thing is cheaper.
we can assume all of that is AI-generated rip off code anyways.
(there were multiple bands with that name over the years)
Oh well
Check out their docs for a glimpse: https://elevenlabs.io/docs/api-reference/introduction
If you wanna hook up a voice agent to Twilio for support for example, 11labs is probably one of the quickest and least painful ways to integrate while still maintaining control over your agent and behaviors.
Yes you can vibe code your own glue code, but try that in a large enterprise where you have to consider your team now taking on perpetual maintenance; and not having a vendor/SLA to just send tickets to when something breaks (or you want something new).
https://minusonelabs.com/
https://minus3labs.com/
https://minus9labs.com/ (borked but existed at one point)
It's getting ridiculous, frankly
I was eager, and knowledgeable enough, to register a unique domain name for the entire household. It wasn't clear how we'd use it, with no permanent Internet presence, and we didn't have any hosting, DNS, or BGP capabilities, but a domain name sure seemed like a nifty thing to have, and it was free. So I aimed to register under .ca.us.
Perhaps I was not feeling creative enough that week, or it was quite difficult to capture the zeitgeist of four completely different college kids sharing a house, but I decided that the best name for us was <street address>-<street name>.san-diego.ca.us. Fictitious example: 1234-main.san-diego.ca.us.
Another curiosity about this particular name was that it may have been on the cusp of standards compliance. In the original DNS specification, a label could not begin with a digit, mainly because of parsing from bare IP addresses, but as you can see, eventually it was permitted, and our domain registration went forward.
It was a real bummer, though, because our household domain name languished, as I argued with my roommates, and we had no means of even setting up email addresses, but for a few shining years I did own a wacky, unique, but very generic street-address-based domain name.
And (unlike many of the <number>-labs companies) at least there's some logic behind using your physical address for a domain.
People argue that it make it more "memorable" than a "theme-based" name, because it's less expected.
But when everyone does it, it becomes less so
One shot