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What is Synthetic Data?

A plain-English explanation of Synthetic Data (Synthetic Data) — what it means, why it matters, and how it is used in AI.

Synthetic Data
Synthetic Data
Synthetic data is data generated by AI models rather than collected from real-world sources. It is used to augment or replace human-labelled training data.
"DeepSeek trained its reasoning model using synthetic reasoning traces generated by a more powerful teacher model."

Also known as: Synthetic training data, AI-generated data

TrainingFine-tuningDatasetDistillation

Why does Synthetic Data matter?

Synthetic data is increasingly used to train specialised models and reduce dependence on expensive human annotation.

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TrainingFine-tuningDatasetDistillation