If you haven’t heard about it yet, Lobe is a sleek new tool from Microsoft that lets you train models without writing any code. You can watch an impressive walktrough video on their website: lobe.ai.
What does it actually do? For now you can only do image classification and have two models to chose from resnet-50 mobilenetV2. The training happens on your local computer and it doesn’t provide GPU support (at least yet).
I was curious what the performance and accuracy are so I tested it on the Oxford Pets dataset. It took around an hour to train on my PC and reached 85% accuracy. Hour worth of training with fastai on the same PC gives 88%. Of course you can do much better and faster if you move to a GPU.
My conclusion is that it’s a cool tool for beginners to prototype quickly on small datasets, doesn’t seem to be very useful beyond that.
