Lobe

Wednesday, 2 May 2018

Lobe just launched publicly today:

Lobe is an easy-to-use visual tool that lets you build custom deep learning models, quickly train them, and ship them directly in your app without writing any code. Start by dragging in a folder of training examples from your desktop. Lobe automatically builds you a custom deep learning model and begins training. When you’re done, you can export a trained model and ship it directly in your app.

It’s a completely visual tool from designer Mike Matas and his co-founders Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges. I am always interested in anything Matas does, and Lobe is no exception.

You build and edit Lobe models through a web interface, and there’s a cloud API developers can use for finished models in production. But Lobe also exports to CoreML (for Apple platforms) and TensorFlow. My analogy: writing CoreML by hand is like writing PostScript by hand — possible, but only by a small number of talented experts. Lobe is to CoreML what Illustrator was to PostScript — a profoundly powerful tool that exposes the underlying technology to non-experts through an intuitive visual interface. Lobe looks utterly Matas-ian.

If you have any interest whatsoever in machine learning, drop what you’re doing right now and watch their 13-minute introductory tour. And if you’re not interested in machine learning, watch the video anyway and you’ll become interested in machine learning. It looks that amazing.