‘No Code’ movement wants to make artificial intelligence accessible to everyone

Sean Cusack, a software engineer at Microsoft and also a beekeeper, wanted to know if something other than bees was getting into their hives. So he built a small photo booth (a kind of bee vestibule) that took pictures whenever something came around. But sorting through thousands of insect portraits proved tedious.

Colleagues told him about a new product the company was working on called Lobe.ai, which allows anyone to train a computer vision system to recognize objects. Cusack used it to identify his bees — but also to keep an eye out for the dreaded Asian killer wasp.

“It was very simple, actually,” Cusack said, adding that the data science required was “beyond my understanding” despite his background.

The Lobe platform allowed him to drag and drop photo samples and click a few buttons to create a system capable of recognizing his beloved bees and detecting unwanted visitors.

Cusack is part of a growing army of “citizen developers” who use new products that allow anyone to apply artificial intelligence without having to write a line of computer code. Advocates of the “no-code” AI revolution believe it will change the world. It used to take a team of engineers to build software, and today users with a web browser and an idea have the power to personally bring that idea to life.

“We’re trying to take AI and make it ridiculously easy,” said Craig Wisneski, a propagator of “no-code” and co-founder of Akkio, a startup that lets anyone make predictions using data.
AI is following a known progression.

“First, it’s used by a small core of scientists,” said Jonathan Reilly, the other partner at Akkio. “Then the user base expands to engineers who can navigate technical nuances and jargon until, finally, it becomes user-friendly enough that almost anyone can use it.”

Just as clickable icons replaced obscure programming commands on home computers, new codeless platforms replace programming languages ​​with simple, familiar web interfaces. And a wave of startups is bringing the power of AI to non-technical people in the fields of images, text and audio.

Juji, for example, is a tool designed to make building AI chatbots as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation. It uses machine learning to automatically handle complex conversation flows and infer particular user characteristics to personalize each engagement, rather than simply offering pre-programmed interactions.

Its co-founder Michelle Zhou said the goal was to give Juji chatbots advanced human abilities like emotional intelligence so they could connect with users on a more human level than existing systems. Using Juji, University of Illinois employees were able to build and manage their custom AI chatbot and scale their student recruitment operations.

But not all existing tools are robust enough to do more than simple tasks. Google’s Teachable Machines is a computer vision tool similar to Lobe.ai. Steve Saling, a former landscape architect now living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, worked with the team at Teachable Machines for about a year and a half training a system to turn switches on and off using his facial expressions.

“It gets more accurate with more data,” Saling said in an email. But he explained that the process of collecting that data — shots of his face at different angles and in varying light — was cumbersome, and the system never achieved the level of precision needed.

“Automation needs to be more than 99% reliable to rely on,” he said. “The Teachable Machines will get there, but they haven’t arrived yet.”

But it’s still the beginning.

“No-code AI tools are still on the fringes of the larger ‘no-code’ movement because many people don’t understand machine learning enough to dream of what’s possible,” said Josh Tiernan, who manages No Code Founders , a community of non-technical entrepreneurs who use no-code tools like WordPress or Bubble.

But he expects codeless AI to grow as more people understand its potential.
Another force in favor of no-code: Advances in AI itself are making these platforms more powerful. OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, has a vast AI system, GPT-3, which can write code when asked in plain English. It can even create websites and do other basic programming tasks. OpenAI used the system to create GitHub Copilot, a tool that works as an auto-complete function for coders, streamlining their work.

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has taken it a step further with an AI tool capable of writing complete code to solve complex problems presented to it with common speech or text.

Users of Microsoft’s Power Platform, which includes a family of no-code products, can generate simple applications just by describing them.

“I could say something like, ‘Search all customer records from the past year,’ and it will do it automatically,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business applications and platforms at Microsoft. He estimates that half of all office work could be automated with AI if there were enough developers to do it. “The only way is to empower everyone to be codeless developers.”

And Cusack, the bee guy? Its AI system never detected a killer wasp, but it did catch plenty of wasps and earwigs sneaking into their hives — a modest but important step for the no-code.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves