The Pile is an open-source dataset comprising approximately 825 GiB (about 800 GB) of diverse English text, developed by EleutherAI to facilitate large-scale language modeling research. (arxiv.org) Launched on December 31, 2020, it aggregates 22 distinct high-quality datasets, including 14 newly constructed ones, covering a wide range of domains such as academic writing, literature, and web content. (en.wikipedia.org) This diversity is intended to enhance models' cross-domain knowledge and generalization capabilities. (arxiv.org)
The Pile has been instrumental in training various large language models (LLMs), including EleutherAI's GPT-Neo, Microsoft's Megatron-Turing, Meta AI's LLaMA, and Yandex's YaLM 100B. (en.wikipedia.org) Its comprehensive documentation and open accessibility have made it a valuable resource for the AI research community.
However, the dataset has faced legal challenges due to the inclusion of copyrighted material, notably the Books3 component, which contains pirated ebooks. In July 2023, the Rights Alliance issued DMCA takedown notices to remove copies of The Pile containing this content. Subsequently, in August 2024, a group of authors filed a lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, alleging unauthorized use of their copyrighted works from The Pile for training its models. (theverge.com)
Despite these controversies, The Pile remains a significant dataset in the field of natural language processing, offering a rich and varied corpus for training and evaluating LLMs.