Data generated by defunct companies is becoming increasingly interesting as training material for AI companies.
Demand for defunct companies’ data emerged suddenly last year, as AI training labs hit the limits of public and synthetic datasets.
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This past August, as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy, Google outbid the AI data company Mercor to buy the carrier’s decades of data, including 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages, and 176,000 employee records. The price tag: $10 million. And Bloomberg reported in September that SpaceX’s AI unit is weighing buying data from struggling startups.
AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models, by Matthew King.
This sounds like a potentially expensive data privacy nightmare in the making. Even just mapping out the parties affected would be difficult, given that conversational data may contain all kinds of references – not only to employees of the company, but also vendors, competitors, customers, et cetera.