Fine-tune language models with Azure Databricks: Review

Launching the notebook for the exercise, I hit the wall right away. A bright yellow callout box at the top states that the provided environment *cannot* run the fine-tuning code. It requires a GPU cluster, which the sandbox doesn't include. So the entire 'exercise' is just scrolling through a pre-written notebook and reading code you can't execute. It feels like getting a tour of a professional kitchen where you're not allowed to turn on the stove.

What’s the point? It demonstrates a workflow, sure. You see cells that load a dataset, initialize a tokenizer, and set up a `Trainer` from the Hugging Face library. But without being able to run it, tweak parameters, or see any output, it's just a static blog post disguised as an interactive lab. I spent maybe 20 minutes reading the text and the code, then another 10 on the multiple-choice quiz. I learned the names of the steps, but not how to perform them. It's frustrating because the setup implies a hands-on experience that it actively denies you.

I even looked for a way to attach my own compute, but the module offers no guidance on that. It's a dead end. I came away with a vague diagram in my head, but zero practical skill. A real lab on this topic would have been incredibly valuable.