Number domain names seem to be popular in countries that don’t use the latin alphabet - ie China or Japan.

01.ai is pretty cool name and domain … for sure beats grok or calling something open when it is actually closed.

China and Japan also have numerical stock tickers, e.g. Sony's ticker 6758 instead of e.g. SONY.

I guess numeric IDs like that were a consequence of early tech making it hard to deal with more complex character sets ... maybe the association lives on in those cultures?

There's also deeper associations with numbers like 8 representing luck, 4 meaning death etc.

Another reason number domains are popular in Asia is that they are much easier to type, especially historically on mobile

Number domains are relatively common in China because you can easily make Chinese language puns with them.

(I don't know what this one means, but it probably is one.)

I suppose you can pronounce 01 as 零一 (zero one), but also 另一 (another), so 01.ai could be read as "another AI".

Seem like the Chinese name of the company is 零一万物 which could translate as "Zero One All Things" - not a bad name for a tech company.

Clearly it's either named after the Peter Thiel book or the song from Love Live.

Before the Internet companies would name themselves „1a-locksmith“ to appear first in the yellow pages in book form. Maybe we have gone full cycle?

Look at the name of the company: Yi. Seems congruent then to use 1, pronunced yi in Chinese, as a domain name.

420.ai, 69.ai or 666.ai are much worse.

In Chinese, 666 is a very good number.

6 sounds like the character 溜 which technically means something like smooth flowing but is used to compliment someone's well-practiced skills.

"666" is often said when someone does something impressive and smoothly. Like if someone double-flips a pancake and it lands perfectly, that's the kind of situation you'd say "666" to compliment them.

On the other hand, don't use 444.ai

Are you telling me that there isn't already a 69.ai working on deepfake porns? I'd be surprised.

made me laugh, thinking that next Elon domain would be xxx.xxx to max the X.