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Colab Pro

colab.research.google.com

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Re: Colab Pro

#61

Post by ehsankia »

freediver wrote: post #5

Good idea, but it's the first premium product that I've seen where the pitch is 'you may get certain features if you subscribe'. In another words there is no guarantee and a premium subscriber may still end up with same GPU as a free user. You may end up with a high-end V100 (not available to free) might be a better pitch.

I mean, it's also 10$/month, you get what you pay for, and for most people this is enough. If you need more, you can get a dedicated GPU instance, but obviously that'll cost much more.

Re: Colab Pro

#62

Post by piadodjanho »

anidh wrote: post #14
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, does that mean you can continuously train a model for e.g. hundred of hours or are you still limited by the 24 hours notebook limit?

The page said "Longer running notebooks and fewer idle timeouts mean you disconnect less often." I'm guessing there is a limit but it has been increased for the pro customers. In contrast on GCE you can train for 22 hours if you want.

The page says its twice the traditional Cloud.

Re: Colab Pro

#63

Post by mistrial9 »

jamesbrock wrote: post #41
anidh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did mathematica invent the notebook format? Just curious..

Yes, my understanding is that Theodore Gray invented the "computational notebook" for Mathematica in the 90s. Here is the best writeup of the history of the notebook that I've ever read. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scie...

quick look at Wikipedia shows Mathematica: "Initial release June 23, 1988;"

Mathematica took at least a year or more to write.. so that goes back perhaps to 1986.. 90s is way off...

Re: Colab Pro

#65

Post by nl »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #24
ludwigschubert wrote: post #20

Can anyone see a reason why they wouldn’t just allow you to provision (and pay for) a persistent Google Cloud VM instead? (I currently do that manually and need port forwarding to a machine that runs Jupyter.) It’s hard for me to understand why Colab would build such a vague pro tier instead of the simplest possible solution: let me pay for my compute. There’s so much more potential, too; they could offer whole clust…

Perhaps this is more profitable. I’ve heard that Colab has become very popular for people doing certain kinds of deep learning, but that the wait for GPU instances has been frustrating. It seems a paid tier to get priority is directly targeting those users.

I doubt they are making much (if anything) from Colab. I think people have found it very convenient (which it is!) but increasingly complaining about the limitation, so the team probably decided to up the limits and try to cover the costs.

Re: Colab Pro

#67

Post by m0zg »

fibrennan wrote: post #59
m0zg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.

Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here ( https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances ) but we're working to make it simpler.

Thanks for not being defensive. I do believe there's not enough competition in this space, so I wish you guys the best of luck.

Let's look at the page you linked. On the top of the page it says "free GPU" and for some reason lists three GPU options of varying capacity, all three "free". But slightly below it's very much "non-free GPU" territory. Which is it? Is it free, or are you going to hit me with a bill later? And if it's free, what's the catch? The "free" stuff on the top of the page invites me to create an instance. Hmm, ok, let's see maybe I'll see the actual pricing there? Nope, it wants me to create an account, which I'm not going to do just to see how much something costs.

Re: Colab Pro

#68

Post by snuxoll »

m0zg wrote: post #67
fibrennan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here ( https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances ) but we're working to make it simpler.

Thanks for not being defensive. I do believe there's not enough competition in this space, so I wish you guys the best of luck. Let's look at the page you linked. On the top of the page it says "free GPU" and for some reason lists three GPU options of varying capacity, all three "free". But slightly below it's very much "non-free GPU" territory. Which is it? Is it free, or are you going to hit me with a bill later? A…

6-hour time limit on free instances, there’s a banner at the top of the page linking to an announcement with this detail.

Might be wise to make this more visible on the pricing page.

Re: Colab Pro

#69

Post by hobofan »

I hate to be the boy who cries "Google will cancel this service", but this offering just seems strange.

With a very low price point coupled with not that huge of a user base, this will end up making how much for Google? $1MM/month? $10MM/month? Either would be negligible for them.

Re: Colab Pro

#70

Post by dragonsh »

m0zg wrote: post #55
dragonsh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a user of colab and recommended to many friends. As mentioned in the other thread the session time of colab notebook is too low, so increasing it for pro is good, but still if one has a large data for testing and training, dependency on google drive or products becomes one another bottleneck, but not that bad. My biggest concern with google product is, it might be shut down any time when any small and med…

The issue is not as acute in this case. These are just Jupyter notebooks, you'll be able to run them on your own hardware with minimal, if any, modifications, unless you choose to use TPUs.

We use both GPU and TPU, but use our own installed Jupyter to keep a copy as backup. Many of our developers like colab, just the reason we keep backup because we have been bitten by google shutting down services more than once. In one case we need to do a re-write of the complete app.
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