Papers › The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
Leo Gao, Stella Biderman, Sid Black, Laurence Golding, Travis Hoppe, Charles Foster, Jason Phang, Horace He, Anish Thite, Noa Nabeshima, Shawn Presser, Connor Leahy
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.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2101.00027")
Code
Syntology Ran 1 of 1 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract.
By repository: official repository: 1 sample from 1 repository, 1 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
22 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
1 sample harvested; 1 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 0 of the 1 sample are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from EleutherAI/The-Pile. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
7ed0726edbb13bb5 · report
Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-3 Davinci 175B (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 0.7177 | #13 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-3 Curie 6.7B (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 0.7980 | #18 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-3 Babbage 1.3B (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 0.8718 | #22 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-3 Ada 350M (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 0.9631 | #23 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-2 XL 1.5B (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 1.0468 | #24 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-2 Large 774M (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 1.0828 | #25 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-2 Medium 355M (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 1.0928 | #26 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | The Pile | GPT-2 Small 124M (pre-trained) | Bits per byte | 1.2253 | #27 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections