Google buys Spirit Airlines data for AI training for just $10 million — purchase includes hundreds of millions of emails, Microsoft Teams chats, billions of flight pricing records, and anonymized passenger records

Spirit Airlines, which declared bankruptcy and shut down on the 2nd of May this year, is selling all its assets in bankruptcy court auctions to pay off its roughly $8.1 billion in debt. According to Bloomberg Law, Google LLC beat out Mercor.io Corp. — an AI-focused recruitment firm — to the airline's data, with the AI tech giant offering $10 million, $2.5 million higher than the latter’s $7.5 million bid. Nevertheless, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York named Mercor.io Corp. as the backup buyer in case the Google deal falls through.

Google said it planned to use the massive amounts of data it purchased for training its AI LLMs, and the amount of data that the tech giant got its hands on is indeed a lot. Court records reveal that the Google purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records for competitors' flights, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records from 2008, and more than 175,000 employee records from 1986. Aside from this, the company will also get information on revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity records, audits and fraud, marketing campaigns, human resources records, project management, and pricing curve data, among others.

This could be a cause of concern for anyone who’s ever transacted with the airline, either as a customer, employee, contractor, or even investor, especially as AI is known for its privacy problems. However, the company will not get access to personal data, including the 97.5 million passenger profiles that the airline kept or the 50.2 million customer records from the Free Spirit loyalty program. Furthermore, the court said that all the data being turned over to Google will be “rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”

The tech giant is seemingly keen on getting its hands on unique data, especially as many companies are now suspected of acquiring thousands of books to train their AI models after they’ve already scraped huge swathes of the internet. Spirit Airlines data is valuable because it’s likely not readily available on the internet and contains specialized information gathered from decades of operation as an airline. Google can then use this to create AI models focused on aviation and offer its services to airlines.

We’re still unsure how AI will fit inside aviation operations, especially as it’s a conservative, safety-focused industry. Nevertheless, Google and other AI companies are probably keen on entering it, especially as air travel is only projected to grow in the coming years.

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