Spirit Airlines data has never been more valuable | Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune
By The Editorial Board | Chicago Tribune
If you recently left a job, it’s likely you lost access to your old inbox and the saved records of those tedious Zoom or Teams meetings. Leaving such digital detritus behind now is part of life. But we doubt you anticipated your employer being able to make money from what you had to say while gainfully employed.
Consider what just happened with the remains of what used to be Spirit Airlines, the bankrupt ultra-low-cost air carrier. Earlier this month, Google was the winner of a highly competitive auction not for the dead airline’s planes or equipment but for the corpse’s data trove. Reportedly, the treasure included 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages, not to mention a ton of lines of code.
Why did Google blow $10 million on such seeming scrap? To train its artificial intelligence agents.
We’ll try not to get too in the weeds here, but in essence the Spirit purchase was like buying a massive business-school case study with bots as the intended students.
By seeing what humans did in actual life, the AI creepy-crawlies can learn about, well, what humans did in actual life. It doesn’t matter if they did what they did well (and, in the case of Spirit, it all failed in the end). It’s all about using this specific business as a way for AI to learn how an airline actually operates in real life or, yet more generally, how humans typically work together in organizations.
And you thought those AI agents were merely ingesting books and newspapers. Nope. They are looking at your old out-of-office replies and ill-considered rants on Teams.
Read on here.
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