Google’s next big AI model could end up using troves of old data from Spirit Airlines.<\/p>\n
Google successfully bid $10 million for troves of corporate data from Spirit Airlines<\/a>, the budget airline that went under earlier this year, according to Chapter 11 bankruptcy court filings. A spokesperson from Google told Business Insider that this data from Spirit Airlines “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.”<\/p>\n “We are buying the company’s internal data and custom software, but we are not buying their customer or credit card information,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n AI training startup Mercor made a rival bid at $7.5 million. Mercor didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. A representative for Spirit Airlines declined to comment beyond the court filings.<\/p>\n The move comes as tech companies, having largely exhausted the open internet for training data, race to grab as much data as they can in other forms.<\/p>\n Corporate data is especially valuable because it can help train bots to handle customer complaints more effectively or debug websites. AI training startup Micro1, for example, announced a new program earlier this year where it pays 50 midsize companies $100,000 to $2 million for access to their anonymized data.<\/p>\n The auction for Spirit Airlines’ data was competitive, according to the filings. Google bid $5 million, only for Mercor to counter with $5.2 million. Mercor also said it was willing to pay more \u2014 $7 million \u2014 if it could obtain the raw data first and then anonymize it. Ultimately, Google bid $10 million and won the deal.<\/p>\n The white-hot race to build the best AI models has led to unconventional tactics for obtaining corporate data.<\/p>\n Meta, for example, announced<\/a> an initiative to track its workers’ keystrokes and mouse movements so it could improve how well its AI uses computers. Meta suspended the program<\/a> after an internal data exposure and a strong backlash from employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google’s next big AI model could end up using troves of old data from Spirit Airlines. Google successfully…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,11362,70362,70361,1329,70359,2623,132,1429,70363,1122,70364,70358,22848,9984,58415,70360],"class_list":["post-142793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-ai-model-development","tag-ai-training-startup-mercor","tag-bankruptcy-court-filing","tag-business-insider","tag-corporate-datum","tag-customer","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-internal-datum","tag-meta","tag-new-program","tag-old-spirit-airlines-datum","tag-race","tag-spokesperson","tag-training-datum","tag-trove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}