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'No Code' AI Startup Lobe Joins Microsoft

Microsoft has acquired an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that offers a "no code" approach for developing AI projects.

The company announced its acquisition of San Francisco, Calif.-based Lobe on Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Lobe offers a drag-and-drop approach for image recognition for deep learning models. Examples can be found here.

"As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools," Lobe said on its Web site. "We plan to continue developing Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms."

"Lobe's simple visual interface empowers anyone to develop and apply deep learning and AI models quickly, without writing code. We look forward to continuing the great work by Lobe in putting AI development into the hands of non-engineers and non-experts," wrote Kevin Scott, Microsoft executive vice president and CTO, in Microsoft's announcement of the acquisition.

Scott pointed out that Lobe is only the most recent of Microsoft's AI-focused acquisitions in the last few months; the company acquired Semantic Machines and Bonsai in July. "These are just two recent examples of investments we have made to help us accelerate the current state of AI development," he commented.

Microsoft also has also announced several of it's own AI initiatives this year. A roundup of its current technologies can be found here.

About the Author

Becky Nagel serves as vice president of AI for 1105 Media specializing in developing media, events and training for companies around AI and generative AI technology. She also regularly writes and reports on AI news, and is the founding editor of PureAI.com. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Users" and other popular AI resources with a real-world business perspective. She regularly speaks, writes and develops content around AI, generative AI and other business tech. She has a background in Web technology and B2B enterprise technology journalism.

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