Does Microsoft Dev Box have a free student virtual IDE like Google Colab for building and training AI/Deep Learning and NLP models in Python Notebooks?

Question

Does Microsoft Dev Box have a free student virtual IDE like Google Colab for building and training AI/Deep Learning and NLP models in Python Notebooks?

Answer 1

Hi Dan Howard Zietlow,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

No, Microsoft Dev Box does not currently offer a free virtual IDE specifically for students to build and train AI/Deep Learning and NLP models in Python Notebooks, like Google Colab does. Microsoft Dev Box is a cloud-based service that provides developers with preconfigured, project-specific virtual workstations optimized for development. It allows developers to quickly spin up dev boxes with the necessary code repositories and tools pre-installed. However, it does not appear to include any free offerings targeted at students or free access to AI/ML-specific tools and runtimes. For students looking to build AI/Deep Learning models in Python, Google Colab remains a popular free option. While Microsoft does offer free tools and resources for students, such as Visual Studio and Azure credits, there is no mention of a free virtual IDE comparable to Google Colab for AI/ML development. Microsoft's focus with Dev Box seems to be on providing cloud-based dev environments for general-purpose software development rather than AI/ML specifically.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/students/

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