In plain words: A new 825 GiB English text collection mixes 22 sources, including academic and professional writing, to give language models broad knowledge across many domains. Models trained on it beat models trained on plain web text on every part of the collection and on downstream tests.
Abstract · The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
Recent work has demonstrated that increased training dataset diversity improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability for large-scale language models. With this in mind, we present \textit{the Pile}: an 825 GiB English text corpus targeted at training large-scale language models. The Pile is constructed from 22 diverse high-quality subsets -- both existing and newly constructed -- many of which derive from academic or professional sources. Our evaluation of the untuned performance of GPT-2 and GPT-3 on the Pile shows that these models struggle on many of its components, such as academic writing. Conversely, models trained on the Pile improve significantly over both Raw CC and CC-100 on all components of the Pile, while improving performance on downstream evaluations. Through an in-depth exploratory analysis, we document potentially concerning aspects of the data for prospective users. We make publicly available the code used in its construction.
Leo Gao, Stella Biderman, Sid Black, Laurence Golding, Travis Hoppe, Charles Foster, Jason Phang, Horace He, Anish Thite, Noa Nabeshima, Shawn Presser, Connor Leahy
arXiv:2101.00027 · cs.CL · submitted Dec 31, 2020
abstract · pdf · html
As far as I know, this was the first academic contribution from a discord collaboration to ML. Back then discord was barely used for ML at all, though nowadays of course the largest discord in the world is midjourney.
There were a bunch of interesting stories from those days. We almost didn’t release at all (or at least the books component) because of fear of copyright backlash. Turns out no one cared, and then suddenly today the world cares a great deal.
As a side note, I’ll be participating in a legal action against Meta for the purpose of making ML models uncopyrightable: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1641804013791215619?s=6.... They DMCA’ed one of my repos distributing LLaMA, so we fought back and challenged the idea that weights can be copyrighted at all. This seems like the best outcome for hackers and individual researchers, for a few reasons. It’s also one of the most ethical outcomes; since ~no one trains on data that they own, they shouldn’t own the resulting model.
One last thing. The Pile would’ve been far less relevant without the wonderful assistance of The Eye, a group of people who archive all kinds of things. They’ve hosted the datasets for years now. And although it seems strange to say that dataset hosting could make or break The Pile, back then there was nobody else willing to host us. https://the-eye.eu/