Crucial Quote
“This is outrageous! We are filing a court objection to Google’s attempt to buy data that has no business being sold,” Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which continues to represent more than 5,500 of Spirit’s flight attendants, told Forbes in a statement.
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Big Number
$7.5 million. That was the losing bid from Mercor, a firm that connects professionals to AI training projects. Mercor was founded by the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
Why Google’s Acquisition Of Spirit Airlines’ Data Matters
AI firms are increasingly gobbling up defunct businesses’ internal communications— Slack archives, Jira tickets, email threads, Google Drive files and more—to improve their models’ skillsets in areas like customer service, financial services and calendar management, as Forbes reported. Google is acquiring Spirit’s enormous digital footprint of how a major airline operated, including extensive internal and external communications records. The competing bid from Mercor shows how AI companies are competing for this valuable new source of training material.
Read more Most Young Americans Are More Concerned About AI Than Excited, Pew Survey Finds
What Is Deidentification For AI Models?
According to the court filing, deidentified data “cannot be associated with, reasonably used to infer information about, or otherwise linked to, a particular consumer.” The process is intended to protect individual privacy and maintain legal compliance before the data is used to train or prompt an AI model. Google is not interested in acquiring customers’ personal information, including loyalty memberships or credit card details, a person familiar with the acquisition told Forbes on the condition of anonymity. Instead, Google intends to use real-world data scrubbed of identifying markers to help its AI agents perform better. The U.S. Trustee, a Justice Department bankruptcy system watchdog, did not reply to Forbes’ query for additional information.
Further Reading
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails (Forbes)
Trump Wants To Give Spirit Airlines An ‘America First’ Rescue (Forbes)