Almost working Google Colab example

[g-simmons]

Hey there,

The example notebook has a comment saying that LIT does not work on Colab since the Colab python version is fixed to 3.7.

I have been trying to get LIT to work on Colab by upgrading the Python version, and I think I have some progress? I can import the lit_nlp library and create the widget, the only issue is widget.render() produces a blank output.

I'm hoping the LIT devs can provide troubleshooting input on how I might get this to work.

Current notebook version.

[uSaiPrashanth]

What helped me fix this problem is to manually assign is_colab to true after importing notebook in colab

Here's a short example of what I ended up doing...

from lit_nlp import notebook
notebook.is_colab = True

# Rest of code cells

widget = notebook.LitWidget({'model': lit_model}, {'ds': lit_dataset})
# lit_model is a lit_nlp.api.model.Model instance
# lit_dataset is a lit_nlp.api.dataset.Dataset instance

widget.render(height = 600)

[RyanMullins]

Colab is running Python v3.10 as of Apr 2023 (see googlecolab/colabtools#3572) so the Notebooks should work out of the box again. I've recently submitted a PR to remove this warning text (806e41d), but this may not update on Colab until our next release.

Closing this issue for now, but please re-open or file a new one if you run into any issues.