https://colab.research.google.com is widely used in data science and AI because of it's pay-as-you go model using a variety of TPU or NVIDIA GPU's. A common use case is going to be to install MAX and python packages into the notebook environment on colab. Couple of other key points:
Colab does not seem to support switching notebook kernels via a menu item. This makes it fundamentally different than jupyter notebook which is self hosted or run locally.
Every tutorial in existence for colab notebooks seems to start off with a notebook cell with the shell command ! pip install my-packages ... into the existing python env. Many scientific and AI packages are pre-installed, for example fastai, torch and transformers.
Background
https://colab.research.google.com is widely used in data science and AI because of it's pay-as-you go model using a variety of TPU or NVIDIA GPU's. A common use case is going to be to install MAX and python packages into the notebook environment on colab. Couple of other key points:
! pip install my-packages ...
into the existing python env. Many scientific and AI packages are pre-installed, for examplefastai
,torch
andtransformers
.Reproduce steps
Go to https://docs.modular.com/max/python/get-started and follow the steps, but in a colab notebook. I am using Colab Pro, which also has a terminal window:
^ as you can see max python package is installed, and python 3.12 as well.
The problem is, all the packages are in a virtualenv, however this is not something the notebook can use!
To confirm, create a notebook cell and execute it (from the get-started doc):
The reason the other imports succeeded is because
torch
andtransformers
is pre-installed on colab instances.Related issues
Suggestion
Enhance magic to support installing into the system python, something like:
magic add --global max