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GlossaryProductsNew to AI

Notebook

Also written: Jupyter Notebook

A document mixing code, text, and visuals for interactive computing, data analysis, and machine learning.

In plain terms

A notebook is like a digital lab notebook. It lets you write and run code, add explanations in plain text, and see charts or images, all in one place.

Think of it for learning a new programming skill or analyzing data. You can try out code snippets, see the results immediately, and write down your thoughts or findings as you go. This makes it easy to experiment and understand complex topics.

The expert version

A notebook is an interactive computational environment that allows users to create and share documents containing live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. It typically consists of cells, where each cell can contain code (e.g., Python, R) or markdown text. The execution of code cells is sequential and interactive, enabling rapid prototyping, data exploration, and reproducible research.

Popular notebook interfaces like Jupyter and Google Colab are widely used in data science and machine learning workflows. They facilitate collaboration and make complex analytical processes more accessible by integrating code, documentation, and output.

Why it matters now

Google Gemini's API Cookbook frequently updates its notebooks, adding new models, fixing links, and improving testing. These updates show how notebooks are central to how developers learn about and use new AI models and features.

Where it shows up 8 items, newest first
How each company uses it
Anthropic Claude
Anthropic uses notebooks in its GitHub courses to guide users on Claude's capabilities.
Google Gemini
Google Gemini heavily uses notebooks in its API Cookbook to demonstrate model usage, provide code examples, and guide developers through new features and migrations.
Related terms

APIJupyterCode InterpreterLLMPrompt EngineeringData Science

Often confused with
IDE
An Integrated Development Environment is a comprehensive software suite for
Script
A script is a standalone file of code intended to be run non-interactive
Markdown Document
A markdown document is primarily for text formatting and stat
Origin

The concept of interactive notebooks gained significant traction with the release of IPython in 2001, which later evolved into Project Jupyter. Jupyter notebooks are now a de facto standard in data science. Source ↗

Try this about 5 minutes

Open a Google Colab or Jupyter notebook. Try writing a simple Python command like `print('Hello, AI!')` in one cell and running it. Then, in another cell, write a sentence explaining what you just did using markdown formatting.

Try it: Playbook entries that use thisPlaybook →

The Playbook: reusable how-tos, prompts, configs and tips pulled out of the news.

Questions people ask

What is a notebook used for?
Notebooks are used for interactive computing, data analysis, machine learning, and sharing code with explanations and results.
Can I use notebooks with AI models?
Yes, notebooks are commonly used to interact with AI models, run code that calls AI APIs, and analyze the AI's outputs.

First seen on Subvolts Sep 17, 2024. Updated Oct 14, 2026. Written by an AI model from the items above and reviewed against them weekly; report an error.