A field guide to AI positions

Training data & datasets

Publication dates and source age

Sources counted: 2

Publication dates are unavailable.

Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

Open in the glossary Reading notes · Structured record

In plain language

Examples used to adjust a model. Their choice affects what the model learns. [1]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

Limits & distinctions

A large dataset can still miss relevant situations. Testing on duplicated training examples can make a model look better than it is on new data. [1] [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

A fuller explanation

A dataset is a collection of examples, such as text or images. The training portion is used to fit the model; separate validation and test portions help assess its performance. [1] [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

How it relates to the map

Ask where the examples came from and whether the evaluation uses genuinely separate material. [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

Share this page

https://theaiatlas.org/ideas/training-data/

Download a share image · Vector image

Image previews are summaries. Keep the page link so readers can check the evidence.

Sources and what we read

  1. 1. Supervised Learning

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Publication dates are unavailable.

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read labeled examples, training, evaluation and inference. Used for the training procedure, without treating labels as infallible or adopting the page’s wording about understanding.

  2. 2. Datasets: Dividing the original dataset

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Publication dates are unavailable.

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read training, validation and test separation, duplicate examples and repeated test reuse. Course examples illustrate evaluation problems; no model was tested here.

Edition and machine-readable evidence

Content version 0.20.0. Evidence cutoff 2026-09-15; this does not mean every source was read on that day.

Pinned complete dataset · Complete evidence page · Agent consumption guide