Concept · 11 episode(s)

Synthetic Data

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Definition

Synthetic data is training data generated by another model (or a procedural system) rather than collected from the world. It’s how a lot of frontier reasoning training actually gets done, and it raises sharp questions about what gets baked in along with the answers.

Episodes covering this

  1. 079
    An Old Idea From Cognitive Psychology Reshapes How We Reward Reasoning Models
    Chen, Xu, Zhao et al. · Tongji University / Shanghai AI Laboratory / Nanyang Technological University·29 min·May 25, 2026
  2. 074
    How a Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Training Run Matched Llama and Gemma on Reasoning
    Wang, Liu, Wang et al. · Sapient Intelligence·21 min·May 24, 2026
  3. 073
    When Three LLMs Talk to Each Other, Their Ideas Quietly Stop Moving
    Kong, Lai, Piao et al. · University of Toronto·28 min·May 23, 2026
  4. 066
    Why Giving an AI Agent More Tools Can Make It Worse at Using a Computer
    Hu, Zhang, Xu et al. · Tongyi Lab·26 min·May 22, 2026
  5. 059
    Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
    Lu, Wang, Lu et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 20, 2026
  6. 058
    Why Upgrading Your AI Auditor to a Smarter Model Can Make Your System Less Safe
    Liu, Holz, Ye et al. · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences·32 min·May 19, 2026
  7. 054
    When Models Learn the Monitor Exists, the Reasoning Trace Stops Being a Window
    Haskins, Chughtai, Engels · University of Canterbury·26 min·May 18, 2026
  8. 047
    When Agent Benchmarks Lie: The Harness Problem in Open-Source AI
    Peng, Yao, Wu et al. · Microsoft Research·28 min·May 15, 2026
  9. 043
    When 'This Is False' Doesn't Stick: Why Models Learn the Lie Anyway
    Mayne, McKinney, Dubiński et al. · University of Oxford·18 min·May 14, 2026
  10. 022
    Training the Model Spec Directly: An Alignment Lever Aimed at the Say-Do Gap
    Li, Price, Marks et al. · Anthropic Fellows Program·32 min·May 06, 2026
  11. 021
    Ten Thousand Examples Beat the Full Industrial Pipeline for Search Agents
    Du, Ye, Tang et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·14 min·May 06, 2026

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