Synthetic Data

Synthetic data means using data generated by AI to train more AI — it's artificial training material. It emerged as an answer to "data exhaustion," the looming shortage of good real-world data, and it's also used in fields like medical data where privacy concerns make real records hard to use.

Picture a teacher model writing practice problems for a student model to learn from. Used well, this is powerful, but it comes with a warning: feeding a model nothing but AI-made data over and over can cause "model collapse," where quality degrades. It's the same principle as a copy of a copy getting blurrier each time.