What claim do you have a problem with?

There are plenty of research papers on synthetic data that show its value, do a search on arxiv for "synthetic data". There are plenty of open-source post-training pipelines that incorporate synthetic data.

As for the claim about accelerating the progress of hardware or materials science, I've seen quite a number of news articles from teams at universities using AI in their work with high quality outcomes, and they're becoming more frequent.

https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/

> We used AI to design the chip, and designed the chip so AI could program it AI played a direct role in Jalapeño’s development, enabling the team to move from initial design to tapeout in nine months by exploring implementations, shortening design, measurement, and verification loops, and continuously iterating on model workloads. AI also helped optimize the chip’s arithmetic circuits, allowing the team to fit more compute performance into the chip on schedule.

https://www.anl.gov/article/scientists-deploy-ai-agents-to-a...

> An AI-driven system automates a powerful simulation method used to discover new materials. The system can potentially reduce discovery time from months or years to just days.