Step 1: Activating the GPU
We must activate the GPU to train our GPT-2 345M-parameter transformer model.
To activate the GPU, go to the Runtime menu in Notebook settings to get the most out of the VM:
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Figure III.1: The GPU hardware accelerator
We can see that activating the GPU is a prerequisite for better performance that will give us access to the world of GPT transformers. So let’s now clone the OpenAI GPT-2 repository.