Google Colab
A free, hosted Jupyter notebook service provided by Google that requires no setup and provides free access to computing resources including GPUs and TPUs.
What it is
Colab takes the Jupyter experience and puts it in the cloud. It allows data scientists to write and execute Python in their browser, seamlessly saving notebooks to Google Drive. It is wildly popular in the AI community because it grants free (though limited) access to powerful GPUs necessary for training models.
When you would use it
You use Google Colab when you need to run machine learning code quickly and collaboratively, especially when you lack the powerful local hardware required to process the data.
Common operations
- Fine-tuning a small open-weight language model without buying local GPU hardware.
- Sharing an interactive data analysis tutorial publicly via a simple link.