The Pile is a large, diverse, open-source text dataset created by the EleutherAI research collective in 2020. It was designed to train large language models (LLMs) and consists of 22 distinct sub-datasets, including books, academic papers, code repositories, and web crawls. The dataset was notable for its scale and diversity, making it a foundational resource for many AI research projects.
The Pile's composition includes sources like PubMed, GitHub, and the US Library of Congress, among others. However, its inclusion of copyrighted material, particularly from books and academic papers, sparked significant legal and ethical debates. This led to the development of the Common Pile, a follow-up dataset created with a focus on ethical sourcing and reduced legal risk.
The Pile significantly influenced the landscape of open-source AI research by democratizing access to large-scale training data, which was previously dominated by tech giants. It also prompted discussions about data provenance and copyright in AI, contributing to a broader industry trend toward responsible AI development. As of 2024, The Pile and Common Crawl remained primary training datasets for many AI models, despite ongoing legal challenges.