May 07, 2026
We are running out of high-quality human-written text on the internet. Synthetic data—data generated by AI models—is the answer to this "data wall," allowing models to continue learning and improving.
Real-world data often lacks "edge cases"—the rare, difficult scenarios that a model needs to master. You can use a powerful "teacher" model (like GPT-4) to generate thousands of high-quality examples of these rare cases, which are then used to train a smaller, specialized "student" model. This technique is what allowed models like Orca and Phi-3 to achieve such high reasoning scores.
Synthetic data can be designed to be perfectly private and balanced. Instead of using sensitive medical records, you can generate "statistically identical" synthetic records that contain no real patient information. Similarly, you can use AI to generate data that deliberately counteracts human biases found in the real world, creating models that are both safer and more equitable.