Why you should worry less about big data centers and more about big data

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. Google’s Spirit Airlines deal could be just the start While data centers remain a major issue in the midterm elections, another aspect of the AI industry’s expansion is drawing far less attention: the enormous amounts of data tech companies are amassing to train their models. Consider Google’s offer to pay $10 million for Spirit Airlines’ business data archive, which is being sold as part of the airline’s bankruptcy proceedings. The archive contains roughly 100 million employee emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and 30 million lines of source code, along with pricing curves, flight operations data, and crew schedules. Google wants the information to help train its AI models. Early AI chatbots were trained primarily on information scraped from the internet.…

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