AI Engineering · interactive
Synthetic data
Let a model write your training examples and you get thousands in an hour. Train on them, generate again from the new model, and two things creep in: the rare cases disappear, and errors feed on themselves. Run eight generations, then mix real data back in and verify what you keep.
Real data
0% mixed in
Model
gen 0 · 40 topics
Generate
2,000 examples
Verify
off
Train the next
gen 1
topics in generation 0 · 40 of 40
2% wrong
common topics ← → rare topicsgrey: the real data
- topics left
- 40/40
- top 5 topics
- 53%
- wrong examples
- 2%
Generation 0 is the real data: all 40 topics, with a long tail of rare ones, and 2% of examples wrong.
after 8 generations: 3/40 topics, 60% wrong
1 Real support tickets cover forty topics, a few of them often and most of them rarely. A few are mislabelled: real data isn't clean either.
40 topics · top 5 = 53% of tickets · rarest topic 0.6%
2 3 4 5
In production
Tools and technologies
Synthetic data pipelines generate, filter and verify; the research names the trap.
Not tied to one language — use these names when you search docs or design a system.
- The Curse of RecursionStandard
Shumailov et al., 2023 (Nature, 2024): models trained on generated data forget the tails (model collapse).
Official site ↗ - Self-InstructStandard
Wang et al., 2022: bootstrapping instruction data from a model's own outputs.
Official site ↗ - distilabelSoftware
Pipelines for generating and judging synthetic datasets.
GitHub ↗ - CosmopediaStandard
A 25-billion-token synthetic textbook dataset, with its generation recipe.
Official site ↗ - ArgillaSoftware
Review and label generated examples before training on them.
GitHub ↗