Google won a bankruptcy auction for the internal data and custom software of Spirit Airlines, the budget carrier that collapsed earlier this year, paying $10M out of the Chapter 11 estate, according to Charles Rollet at Business Insider. A Google spokesperson said the purchase leaves out customer and credit card records, that everything will be anonymized, and that the material can improve its products and AI models. Bidding opened at $5M from Google, and AI training startup Mercor countered at $5.2M before offering more on the condition it could take the raw files and anonymize them itself. Mercor's argument is that decades of operational records show how work actually gets done, which makes them valuable for training models now that labs have worked through the open web.
