Understanding the hardware requirements for training models
Flair sequence labeling models are essentially special types of neural networks. You may have heard that in order to do inference on (that is, use) or train neural networks, you need a high-performance Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-equipped machine. Training a neural network requires a computation of a large number of mathematical operations (largely matrix multiplication). Most of these operations can be parallelized much better on GPUs as opposed to CPUs, which speeds up the training process significantly. But this doesn't necessarily mean you can't do any training or inference without a GPU. Whether you actually need a GPU will simply depend on the size of the neural network you are training and the number of hours, days (or decades) you have at your disposal to wait for the training to finish. If you are simply starting off with neural networks and are experimenting with training tiny networks with a handful...