google-generativeai package does not work in Mesop + Colab

[williamito]

Describe the bug
When using the google-generativeai SDK within a mel.chat() transform function, the UI gets stuck and the response never resolves. There are a bunch of errors in the browser Console. The same code works as expected in a normal code cell. I'm told it also works in Mesop running directly (not in Colab) but did not try to reproduce myself.

Interestingly, the equivalent code from the google-genai SDK does work.

Similar failure using both the generate_content() and start_chat() versions.

To Reproduce

This fails:

!pip install mesop
!pip install google-generativeai

import google.generativeai as genai
genai.configure(api_key="API_KEY")
model = genai.GenerativeModel('gemini-2.0-flash-exp')
chat_session = model.start_chat()

import mesop as me
import mesop.labs as mel
me.colab_run()

@me.page(path="/chat")
def page():
  mel.chat(transform)

def transform(prompt: str, _: list[mel.ChatMessage]) -> str:
    response = chat_session.send_message(prompt)
    return response.text

me.colab_show(path="/chat", height='800')

This works:

!pip install mesop
!pip install google-genai

from google import genai
client = genai.Client(api_key="API_KEY")
chat_session = client.chats.create(model='gemini-2.0-flash-exp')

import mesop as me
import mesop.labs as mel
me.colab_run()

@me.page(path="/chat")
def page():
  mel.chat(transform)

def transform(prompt: str, _: list[mel.ChatMessage]) -> str:
    response = chat_session.send_message(prompt)
    return response.text

me.colab_show(path="/chat", height='800')

[richard-to]

I think this is related to this issue: #921

Seems like something on the colab side that we can't fix on our side. So it may be better to just use the google-genai lib since that one does work as you mentioned.