They super earned it. From day one, everyone showed up with a level of drive and determination I haven't seen elsewhere.

My name is on The Pile paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027 but I didn't do anything except make the books3 dataset. Stella, Leo, and everyone else did the hard work. You know, the work that's "actually useful to the scientific community." I didn't even help them hunt for typos, even though Stella asked me to. I was just like, sorry, no time, I have to focus on my own research.

Imagine saying "nah" to helping shape one of the most important open source AI research projects of the coming years. Training data quality is becoming more and more of a focus.

Lemme tell you a quick story.

When https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/09/eleutherai-claims-new-nlp... come out, this quote caught my eye:

> But EleutherAI claims to have performed “extensive bias analysis” on The Pile and made “tough editorial decisions” to exclude datasets they felt were “unacceptably negatively biased” toward certain groups or views.

When I read this, I felt astonished that Eleuther was yet again trying to pose as the cool super-progressive AI lab. To my knowledge, no such thing ever happened. And I was involved with The Pile back when it was just me and Leo memeing in Discord DMs about how the world needed some quality training data once and for all.

I went to Stella in DMs (you should follow her too! https://twitter.com/BlancheMinerva/status/139408950872390042...) and was like, what the hell? I don't understand how this could possibly be true. What are these supposed "tough editorial decisions"?

Stella calmly explained to me that the US Congressional Record had been considered and rejected for inclusion in The Pile. I thought "Big deal, who the hell cares?" while saying "Okay, but I don't know what that is."

It’s a written record of all statements made in the US legislature. It was also somewhere between 1GB and 15GB, which would have been a significant portion of The Pile's total size.

I'm going to quote from her private DMs with me, which I haven't asked for permission to do. So this is technically another bad move by me. But she put it so perfectly, I was stunned:

> For half the history of the US, black people were slaves. For something like 75% of it, black people didn’t have the right to vote. A modern reader didn’t think there wasn’t a high proportion of extremely racist content, that would primarily be an inditement of modern people lol.

> The reason we first looked at it was that we included a similar document for the EU Parlement

It took me a few minutes to come to my senses, but I finally realized:

(a) this dataset likely contained a huge proportion of content that, politics aside, would be a Very Bad Idea to include in your ML models by default;

(b) Eleuther had just been trying to do good work this whole time

So you know, when you're in that situation, you can choose to either keep believing your own false ideas, or you can pay attention to empirical evidence and change your behavior. And empirically, I had been a massive asshole to everyone since pretty much the beginning. The only thing I helped with was books3 and arranging The Eye to get them some reliable hosting. (Shoutout to The Eye, by the way. Help 'em out if you can: https://the-eye.eu/public/AI/)

And there's my name, right there on the paper.

It's even worse than I described. I put the paper in jeopardy, because they were submitting it to a conference with strict anonymity rules. I had no idea about it (no one told me). I ended up so happy to see my name on a real arxiv paper that I tweeted out some self-congratulatory bullshit, and quote-tweeted something linking to The Pile. It was a few days into the anonymity period, but nonetheless, it was a violation of the anonymity rules. A lot of people saw that tweet, and the whole point of the rules is to ensure that people don't get unfair advantages by advertising on social media.

When they came to me in DMs apologizing profusely for not talking with me about it, and asking me to delete the tweet, I basically told them to go shove a spoon up their.... because I didn't agree to any rules, and the idea that The Pile should go radio silent for five months on social media struck me as completely crazy.

In hindsight, I was... just awful. So I mean, me posting this is like, the absolute minimum I can do. They've been the ones working for like a year to make all of this happen. Ended up feeling like a fraud, since everyone thinks highly of my ML work, and here I'd been nothing but problematic for a group of people who are just trying to ship good scientific work.

Fast forward to today, and the results are clear. Go help Eleuther: https://www.eleuther.ai/ They're cool, and you'll get a shot at changing the world. I'm not sure you even have to be particularly skilled; some of the most valuable work was done by people who just showed up and started doing things, e.g. making the website look a little nicer, or making a cool logo.