Glossary
Data curation
The work of selecting, cleaning, filtering, and documenting data before it is used for training. Curation quality strongly influences what a model learns.
Typical stages: quality and language filtering, deduplication, screening for toxicity and PII, format normalization, and documentation. For speech and video, curation adds alignment checks, level normalization, and metadata verification. A repeated finding in training research is that better-filtered data beats more data at the same compute.
Why it matters
An owner who delivers curated, documented data has already done the buyer’s most expensive pipeline step.