Getting started#

Installation via Poetry (recommended)#

This repository utilizes poetry for package management, which is recommended for dependency installation and is mandatory for InterLab development. Poetry automatically generates and manages a virtual environment for you, and also installs interlab module itself. If you have poetry installed, running the following command will install InterLab:

poetry install

Installation via pip (alternative)#

Alternatively, pip can be used to install dependencies with pip install -r requirements.txt (core requirements) or pip install -r requirements-full.txt (including development tools, Jupyter Lab, etc.; equivalent to poetry install).

Please note, when using pip, you're responsible for managing any virtual environments and deciding where packages should be installed.

Running Jupyter Lab#

Jupyter Lab provides the simplest way to interact with the code and design experiments:

poetry run jupyter lab
# Or without poetry, in the project root folder:
jupyter lab

After running the command, open the provided link in your browser. notebooks/car_negotiation.ipynb is a recommended starting point.

Google Colab#

Google Colab often offers a lightweight alternative to setting up InterLab locally on your computer. Interlab comes with built-in colab compatibility and we have prepared a example InterLab Colab notebook with common setup and a simple example experiment with two LLMs interacting on behalf of their users.

Note: API Keys#

In order to use LLM provider serveics and APIs, you need to generate and provide the corresponding API keys. You can provide the keys as environment variables, via .env file, or interactively on every run (e.g. in the colab). Storing keys in the notebook is possible but not recommended (as they easily leak into git or while sharing the code).

API keys can be stored in a .env file located in the notebook directory or your home directory. (This file is ignored by git by default, providing an additional security measure.) The file is a simple text file with key=value pairs, for example:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
OPENAI_API_ORG=org-...
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

You can then import these variables from the .env file into a Jupyter notebook using the dotenv package.

import dotenv
dotenv.load_dotenv()