On-the-cheap Machine Learning, revisited

A short update on my On the Cheap Machine Learning blog post. After almost a year of use, I’m still pretty happy with the setup. The hardware has worked well. I haven’t done as much independent ML research as I had hoped, but I have contributed many hours of night-time GPU cycles to the Leela Zero open-source Go-game-AI project. I don’t think I would change anything about the build, and there’s nothing about it I want to upgrade yet.

However, in the past year a new option has appeared for on-the-cheap machine learning: Google’s Colaboratory project. Colaboratory is a free web-based IDE for writing machine learning applications. What’s especially cool about it is that comes with access to a cloud-based GPU. The GPU they provide is the NVIDIA K80, which is not the fastest GPU, but it’s still plenty fast for experimenting with machine learning. [Disclosure: I work for Google, but not in any groups related to Google Colaboratory.]

Colaboratory puts machine learning within the reach of anyone with a modern web browser, even if that browser is on a device (like a laptop, tablet, or even phone) that doesn’t have a high-end GPU.

I find myself using Colaboratory instead of my own desktop computer simply because my son’s often using my desktop computer for schoolwork, YouTube and playing games.

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