In 2006, the British mathematician Clive Humfry coined the now-familiar phrase, ‘Data is the new oil’. However, 16 years from his pronouncement, the realities and consequences of this “new oil” have caused many to turn to a renewable alternative to power AI: synthetic data.
If data is the new oil, synthetic data is an ethical and renewable alternative
In 2006, the British mathematician Clive Humfry coined the now-familiar phrase, ‘Data is the new oil’. However, 16 years from his pronouncement, the realities and consequences of this “new oil” have caused many to turn to a renewable alternative to power AI: synthetic data.
Move over software; it’s now artificial intelligence “eating the world” – and its seemingly insatiable appetite for training data means developers urgently need a new source of accurate, privacy-compliant data to fuel their models. Training a simple visual recognition AI requires upwards of 100,000 perfectly-annotated, privacy-compliant images. The challenge for AI developers then is where to source this data – and in high-enough volume.
