An Introduction to Colab and Jupyter for Beginners
When to use Google Colab vs. Jupyter Notebooks
Good morning, and welcome to the third video lesson of our Python course: our introduction to Google Colab and Jupyter Notebooks. And, more importantly, some useful tips on when to use which.
These are two fantastic environments that let you write code, see the outputs right away, add notes and explanations for yourself or others, and basically craft these interactive experiences that can go far beyond a traditional script file.
But before we dive in further, I’d love to introduce the sponsor of this iteration, which can help you construct large agent frameworks without having to worry much about coding at all... my friends at DoFlo!
If you are not using workflows, you are already falling behind! LLMs are becoming more and more powerful and capable of handling more important tasks.
Though, they are not powerful agents yet (e.g. Devin is a clear example showcasing their limitations). Still, they are becoming good enough to lead workflows quite efficiently!
If you use Zapier for automating summaries. recaps or even building “agents” (workflows), like me, consider trying doFlo. If you haven’t used any workflow tools, try this one out! It is a super convenient and free drag-and-drop tool to link all your apps and integrations, whether Facebook, LinkedIn, or Notion, with your preferred LLM provider like OpenAI or Anthropic.
For example, I could fetch world news to generate a commentary and an image with Dall-E (need to replace with reve.art now!), and automatically post it on LinkedIn and schedule this to run whenever I want. All automated and all done with a few clicks in five minutes (see image). This is just one example, but you can do many amazing things automatically, thanks to the combined power of LLMs and workflows.
Definitely the time to look more into automations! There are over 2,500 integrations, leveraging a data-driven approach and an async architecture that lets multiple tasks run in parallel. On top of that, they say that automation consultants call it “the best UX in the industry" (which I must agree with honestly), and includes free AI-powered steps + supports multiple triggers per workflow.
Check it out here: https://doflo.com/
By the way, since they are friends and newly scaling up, I’d also recommend joining their discord as they are active almost 24/7 helping out : https://discord.gg/PvPvFWhr4P
Back to notebooks...
You might have heard of both and thought they were basically the same thing, or maybe you’ve never really used either and want to know which is best to start with.
Whichever category you’re in, today I’ll walk you through a friendly introduction to Jupyter Notebooks and Google Colab, compare them, and share some tips on when you might want to use each one...
Learn more in the article (here) or the full video with visuals:
By the way, if Python programming (or just working with LLMs) is something interesting to you and you finally want to make the move to learn programming with Python as a tool to code with LLMs, now is your chance! With such powerful help and proper guidance, you can learn Python programming faster than we've ever could.
And we've built a course just for that! Check out our Python Primer for Generative AI here.
And that's it for this iteration! I'm incredibly grateful that the What's AI newsletter is now read by over 20,000 incredible human beings. Click here to share this iteration with a friend if you learned something new!
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Thank you for reading, and I wish you a fantastic week! Be sure to have enough sleep and physical activities next week!
Louis-François Bouchard