Can AI train itself on data that doesn't even exist?

When real-world data runs out, AI creates its own - and it works better than you'd think.

The answer

Synthetic data - artificially generated training data - has become a critical strategy as AI models exhaust available internet-scale datasets. NVIDIA's Omniverse generates photorealistic synthetic images for self-driving car training, while companies like Gretel and Mostly AI produce synthetic tabular data for healthcare and finance where privacy restrictions limit real data access. Research from Google and others showed that models trained on carefully generated synthetic data can match or exceed those trained on real data for specific tasks. By 2025, Gartner estimated that synthetic data would be used in 60% of AI development projects, with the synthetic data market projected to reach $3.5 billion by 2028.

Source: MIT Technology Review

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