Microsoft is acquiring Lobe, an AI tool based on drag-and-drop – TechCrunch

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Lobe, a startup that allows you to build machine learning models with the help of a simple drag-and-drop interface. Microsoft plans to use Lobe, which was launched in beta earlier this year, to take advantage of its own efforts to facilitate the construction of AI models, even though, for the moment, Lobe will work as before.

"As a member of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage AI research, global infrastructure and decades of experience in creating development tools," the team writes. "We plan to continue to develop Lobe as a stand-alone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms."

Lobe was co-founded by Mike Matas, who previously worked on the iPhone and iPad, as well as Facebook's Paper and Instant Articles products. The other co-founders are Adam Menges and Markus Beissinger.

In addition to Lobe, Microsoft has also recently purchased Bonsai.ai, a strong learning platform, and Semantic Machines, a conversational AI platform. Last year, he acquired the participant of Disrupt Battlefield, Maluuba. It's no secret that machine learning talent is hard to come by, so it's no surprise that all major technology companies are learning as much talent and technology as they can.

"In many ways, we are only beginning to realize the full potential that AI can offer," said Kevin Scott, vice president and chief technology officer, Microsoft, in today's announcement. "This is largely because the development of AI and the creation of in-depth learning models are slow and complex processes, even for experienced scientists and data developers. To date, many people have been disadvantaged in accessing AI, and we are committed to changing that. "

It should be noted that Lobe's approach complements Microsoft's existing Azure ML Studio platform, which also offers a drag-and-drop interface for creating machine learning models, albeit with a more utilitarian design than the Lobe team. Both Lobe and Azure ML Studio aim to make machine learning easy to use for everyone without having to know the ins and outs of TensorFlow, Keras, or PyTorch. These approaches are always accompanied by some limitations, but just like the low-code tools, they are useful and work well enough for many use cases.