You can see Google Collab as Google Docs for code. It gives you access to computing power (GPUs) provided by Google in the "cloud", so you don’t need to use your own computer’s processing power in order to run the program. This is useful, because Machine Learning programs need very powerful computers to run and Google Colab offers this (mostly) for free.
Google Colab is multiple things at once:
- it's a code editor (like VSCode or Coda, but in the browser!)
- it's a way to explain and document your code (with comments between your code blocks)
- it's a very powerful computer (very useful for AI programs)
You use Google Colab to run so called "notebooks". These are programs that other people have written and which you can run on Google's computers.
You can find more information about Google Colab in the Google Colab FAQs: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html
[[Cool Google Colab Notebooks.md]]