Google Paid $10M for a Bankrupt Airline's Teams Messages — Work History as AI's Most Valuable Asset
bigdata · x · 2026-09-15
Ben Lorica analyzes Google's $10 million deal to buy bankrupt Spirit Airlines' internal data — emails, Teams messages, spreadsheets, operating records — for AI and product development; flight attendants objected and a judge has delayed approval. His core argument: as capable models become commoditized, durable value shifts to the record of how work actually gets done. Companies mostly keep outputs (finished analyses, closed tickets, shipped code), but agents benefit more from process data — what someone looked for, ignored, which tools they used, where they got stuck, how they corrected course. He proposes a hierarchy: raw logs at the bottom, goal-decision-outcome sequences above, curated examples/failure cases/reusable workflows on top. Researchers are already inferring people's roles from software dev event logs to generate matching agents.
Related event: Google pays $10M for bankrupt airline's internal data to fuel AI(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- 'Meatwashing': manually rewriting AI output to hide its origin, and why it's a double waste — JeremyNguyenPhD · 2026-11-02
- AI safety researcher: AI companies entirely lack this kind of effective human oversight — davidmanheim · 2026-11-02
- Long-read: AI's real value comes after the efficiency era—infra glut, agent tooling boom — yangyi · 2026-11-02
- vikhyat predicts alternating compute oversupply and undersupply on the road to AGI — TheZachMueller · 2026-11-02
- Sam Altman: AI has surpassed top scientists, and 2026 will be a turning point year — kimmonismus · 2026-11-02
- DeepSeek design doc: a person can only follow 3-5 agent sessions at once, attention is the real bottleneck — heyshrutimishra · 2026-11-02