Depends on what you do with it. Synthetic data seems to be really powerful if it’s human controlled and well built. Stuff like tiny stories (simple llm-generated stories that only use the complexity of a 3-year olds vocabulary) can be used to make tiny language models produce sensible English output. My favourite newer example is the base data for AlphaProof (llm-generated translations of proofs in Math-Papers to the proof-validation system LEAN) to teach an LLM the basic structure of Mathematics proofs. The validation in LEAN itself can be used to only keep high-quality (i.e. correct) proofs. Since AlphaProof is basically a reinforcement learning routine that uses an llm to generate good ideas for proof steps to reduce the size of the space of proof steps, applying it yields new correct proofs that can be used to further improve its internal training data.
Depends on what you do with it. Synthetic data seems to be really powerful if it’s human controlled and well built. Stuff like tiny stories (simple llm-generated stories that only use the complexity of a 3-year olds vocabulary) can be used to make tiny language models produce sensible English output. My favourite newer example is the base data for AlphaProof (llm-generated translations of proofs in Math-Papers to the proof-validation system LEAN) to teach an LLM the basic structure of Mathematics proofs. The validation in LEAN itself can be used to only keep high-quality (i.e. correct) proofs. Since AlphaProof is basically a reinforcement learning routine that uses an llm to generate good ideas for proof steps to reduce the size of the space of proof steps, applying it yields new correct proofs that can be used to further improve its internal training data.