Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom in 2022, it’s been clear that having the right data, and enough of it, is essential to creating an AI model that is accurate, reliable, and efficient. The problem? The best data, particularly specialized “expert” data in specific domains like health and finance, is in short supply. AI companies have strip-mined the internet for fresh information, but AI models are constantly hungry—and must be fed.
San Francisco–based startup Gretel AI has long believed that the most satisfying solution is to create fake food that is just as tasty as the real thing. It helps clients such as EY, Google, and the U.S. Department of Justice generate synthetic data—that is, artificially generated data that mimics the characteristics of real-world data. And it’s getting easier to make it: Today, for example, Gretel announced the wide availability of a generative-AI–powered system that lets users create synthetic datasets for tabular data—think of text and number data that goes in columns and rows, like Excel spreadsheets—with just a natural language prompt like those used for ChatGPT.
