For anyone who is running into issues with slow training times for this assignment, Colab was recently changed to no longer support GPU with Tensorflow 2.8 - and since this assignment specifically loads TF 2.8 for compatibility with the autograder. No GPU makes the training MUCH slower.
The staff will fix this issue when they get back from break in early January, but in the meantime:
Anyone who is working on a local machine environment can use the elegant solution @anoopebey came up with (see above). Thank you @anoopebey, very nice!
For the rest of us using Colab, I suggested a hacky work-around for the Week 1 assignment, that should work for this assignment, too:
@Deepti_Prasad Hello, I passed the assignment without doing any change on my code, the problem is that the autograder need to run on tensorflow 2.8.0 but the GPU isn’t enable GPU it took me 8 hrs to train the model in colab and local enviroment
