Field notes
Models are what they eat, and this is the menu. The pattern worth noticing: the web's free text has essentially been consumed, which is why the newest records here are about curation and synthesis, not scraping.
Start with these three
CC
Common Crawl
A tiny nonprofit's web archive that accidentally fed the AI revolution.
F&
FineWeb & FineWeb-Edu
The open world's state of the art — 15 trillion tokens, recipe included.
L5
LAION-5B
The dataset behind open image generation — and its cautionary tale.
Training datasets & corpora
7
CC
Common Crawl
The nonprofit web archive nearly every LLM ate first.
C4
C4
Google's cleaned Common Crawl — the reproducible baseline.
F&
FineWeb & FineWeb-Edu
Hugging Face's 15-trillion-token state of the art in open pre-training data.
IM
ImageNet
The 14-million-image labeled dataset that started the deep-learning era.
L5
LAION-5B
5.85 billion image-text pairs — the fuel of open image generation, and its scandal.
RE
RedPajama
The open reproduction of Llama's training mix.
TP
The Pile
EleutherAI's 825 GB of curated diversity — open-source pre-training's foundation.