As the AI race continues to hunt for new data to use for AI training, Google has just purchased a huge dump of old data from the now-defunct Spirit Airlines to be “helpful” in training its AI models.
Spirit Airlines, a low-cost airline in the US that was already dealing with financial struggles, abruptly shut down earlier this year in the midst of skyrocketing fuel costs during the height of the conflict in Iran. Now, bankruptcy auctions are underway around the remainder of the airline’s assets, and Google was one of the buyers.
Google wasn’t interested in Spirit for the sake of aviation, but rather for all of the data left behind by the airline.
Bloomberg Law reports that a $10 million bid from Google included data on operations and business, as well as software code, all of which will be used to train AI models. Google, in a brief statement, said:
We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.
This data won’t include personal information, though. Google says that the data will be “rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt” and it won’t include data such as passenger profiles and loyalty program information. It does include hundreds of millions of Microsoft Teams chats as well as over 100 million emails, as well as information “related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, and audits and fraud,” a court explained. Bloomberg’s report further mentions data on “marketing campaigns, human resources, strategy, and project management,” pricing from over 7 billion competitor flights, around 7.5 billion passenger transaction records from nearly two decades of operations, and more than “30 million lines of code.”
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