AI and machine learning data is content licensed for training, fine-tuning, evaluating and grounding models: text corpora, images, video, speech, human-labelled datasets, synthetic data and real-time content for retrieval. AI labs, enterprise AI teams, startups and researchers buy it to improve model quality in specific domains and languages, and to reduce legal risk by using rights-cleared sources.
What the sub-categories cover
- LLM training data: licensed text corpora and instruction data for language models.
- Image datasets: labelled and unlabelled image collections with rights cleared.
- Video datasets: licensed footage with metadata and captions.
- Speech and audio data: transcribed speech and audio events with speaker consent.
- Annotated and labelled data: human-labelled data for supervised learning and evaluation.
- Synthetic data: generated data that mirrors real distributions without personal data.
- RAG and grounding data: fresh, licensed content delivered for retrieval-augmented AI.
How to choose
Rights and provenance come first. The licence must explicitly allow AI training or retrieval for your use, and the provider should show where content came from and how consent was obtained. Then test quality: duplication, noise, label accuracy, coverage of your languages and domains, and overlap with evaluation benchmarks.
Delivery and pricing
Data is delivered as files in cloud storage or through APIs. Pricing units vary by modality: per token or document for text, per image, per hour for audio and video, per labelled item for annotation and per query for retrieval.
Before you buy
- Require explicit AI training or retrieval rights in the licence.
- Ask for provenance, consent and copyright documentation.
- Test a sample for quality and duplication.
- Clarify indemnities and deletion obligations.