Data, Corpora & Tokenization · 2021

The Pile

Leo Gao, Stella Biderman, Sid Black, et al.

Assembled an 800GB English text corpus from 22 curated, diverse sources, giving open language-model training a large, documented, multi-domain dataset instead of ad hoc web scrapes.

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Plain-language summary

EleutherAI combined 22 sources spanning academic writing, code, books, legal and other domains into a single 800GB corpus, deliberately weighting high-quality and specialized text rather than relying only on filtered Common Crawl. They documented composition, per-source weighting, and preprocessing, and showed models trained on this mixture improved on domain-specific evaluation relative to web-only data. It became a widely used training and benchmarking corpus for open models such as GPT-Neo and GPT-J.

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Provenance

Record ID
P-123
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.