More synthetic data for advancing AI and machine learning

Probably, we will see much more synthetic data generated in the future. It's cheaper and more abundant than real data. Can be customized in many ways. Avoids or alleviate hot button issues like gender or skin color bias. 

Similar approaches have been around for at least the past two decades, e.g. data augmentation or toy examples/datasets. 

Computer Vision: Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone

Very interesting and impressive research paper from Microsoft!

The sticking point is the hardware and computation necessary:

"We render a single training dataset for both landmark localization and face parsing, comprising 100,000 images at 512×512 resolution. It took 48 hours to render using 150 NVIDIA M60 GPUs. ...

our GPU cluster used approximately 3,000kWh of electricity ...

Assuming $1 per hour for an M60 GPU (average price across cloud providers), it would cost $7,200 to render 100,000 images. Though this seems expensive, real data collection costs can run much higher ..."

[2109.15102] Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone