Gold Labels
The answers you trust completely, usually because a careful human wrote them down.
Think of it like
The teacher’s answer key at the back of the book — the one everything else gets graded against.
Example
Before scoring a support-bot, a team hand-labels 500 tickets with the “correct” category and treats those as gold.
How it actually works
Gold labels are the reference answers you assume are right, produced by expert humans or a trusted process. They’re expensive, so you rarely have many — which is exactly why people reach for weak supervision or synthetic data to fill the gap. If your gold set is itself wrong or biased, every number downstream inherits that flaw.
For product teams
Your metrics are only as trustworthy as the gold set they’re scored against, so invest in getting a small clean one.
For engineers
A curated, high-confidence labeled set used as ground truth for evaluation or as the seed for training.
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