Google acquires Spirit Airlines customer data trove for $10 million
Source: The Register: Biting the hand that feeds
Google's $10 million purchase of 100+ million emails and 30 million phone calls from bankrupt Spirit Airlines reflects an emerging market for operational exhaust as AI training material—specifically, unstructured conversational and transactional data that large language models need to improve customer service and dialogue systems. LLM development is increasingly a hunt for authentic human communication at scale, with companies willing to pay nine-figure sums for data that would have been worthless to previous software generations. A failed airline's customer complaint logs and support calls now command higher value as training data than as operational records.