[Swenrekcah]

Are you referring to ad tech somehow being useful or that some of FB/Google pet projects ultimately funded by ads have been useful?

Just curious, especially if you mean the former.

[dnautics]

both. For the first category, basically "machine learning advances in general". For the second, "machine learning advances like alphafold".

I reserve the right to claim at some future date, possibly in the next few hours, "the circular payoff is mostly tapped out".