Google Colaboratory

Sometimes someone approaches me, eager to delve into AI, but lamenting their weak laptop without a graphics card. What’s not widely known is that Google offers a free service called Colab – an executable document compatible with Jupyter notebooks. Colaboratory is, therefore, a research tool for education and research in machine learning and artificial intelligence, requiring no special setup.

It works similarly to Google Docs (you can launch it from Chrome, Firefox, Safari…), except that instead of writing in “Word”, you write, execute, and share Python code along with accompanying text and images. And when I say you can execute, I mean you can do so both on your own hardware and on quite decent virtual Google hardware (CPU, GPU, and TPU).
If I’ve understood correctly, Google Colaboratory has recently begun transitioning to the new Nvidia T4 GPU, which is somewhat faster than the old Nvidia K80 GPU and, importantly, has more memory.

For me, Colaboratory is something truly amazing. It breaks down yet another barrier to engaging with ML and AI. Thank you, Google!

Introduction:

Welcome: https://colab.research.google.com/

FAQ: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html