Google buys data of bankrupt airline to train AI models
What's the story
Google has acquired a trove of internal business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines for $10 million. The tech giant plans to use this information for product development and training its artificial intelligence (AI) models. The data includes employee emails, Microsoft Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars, as well as marketing, productivity and operations-related information.
Privacy measures
All acquired data will be de-identified before the sale
Before the completion of the sale, all acquired data will be de-identified.
This process will ensure that no customer information or personally identifiable information is included in the final dataset.
A US bankruptcy judge is scheduled to hear a court hearing on Wednesday to consider approving this data sale.
Asset liquidation
Spirit Airlines is in bankruptcy after shutting down operations
Spirit Airlines has been liquidating its assets in bankruptcy after shutting down operations in May, owing to high debt and high fuel costs.
The airline also received a $7.5 million bid from Mercor, an AI data company.
Google's acquisition of the data is part of this ongoing asset liquidation process.
Flight data
Dataset includes pricing details from 7B+ flights
Google's acquisition also includes pricing details from over seven billion competitor flights and around 7.5 billion passenger transaction records spanning nearly two decades.
The tech giant has acquired more than "30 million lines of code."
All personal information in this dataset will be scrubbed by a third party before any use for AI training.