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How does collab make money? Do you have to eventually pay? Or pay to make it faster? Considering the computationally intensive nature of ML, does it make more

• zmmmmm 6y ago
  Yes, given Google's reputation, relying on anything run by Google that doesn't make (a lot!) of money is a high risk venture. It's one thing to do so when you have options to fall back to, but if you are buying yourself a machine learning laptop as a long term (2 year+) investment on the basis that you don't need GPU hardware because of Colab ...
• iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  Collab is awesome. It's not really for any serious training, it's for evaluating and sharing ML models that (may) need a GPU, and learning. But for many situations, it replaces the need to have a laptop with a GPU - it's good enough for getting set up before you engage the real compute to do serious training. If collab was not free, I would consider paying a subscription for it, which is maybe the end game. They have a paid version now that is supposed to be faster and more lenient about disconnecting you, but I recently read a comparison that said it wasnt worth it.
• aljarry 6y ago
  I guess it's a testing environment for Google Tensors.
• hamilyon2 6y ago
  Google collab doesn't need to make money. It needs to suffocate space so much, that no potential competitor with commercial offering ever has a chance. The money they make here is money they save by not having to buy competitor for nine figures later.