AI engineering glossary · LLM training alignment
What is synthetic data?
Synthetic data (also called Model-generated data): Training data generated by a model or program instead of collected from people or the real world. It is used to add rare cases, reasoning traces or instruction pairs cheaply, but poorly filtered synthetic data can spread errors and reduce diversity.
Synthetic data: an example
A team generates 100,000 synthetic customer questions in Hinglish with a strong model, then filters them before fine-tuning.
Related terms
More LLM training alignment terms
- Task arithmetic
- Teacher-student learning
- Tensor parallelism
- Test-time compute scaling
- Trust region policy optimisation
- UltraFeedback
- Value function
- Warmup-stable-decay schedule
Where you learn it
Synthetic data is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.