Exactly. If Google's ads income suddenly got cut in half, most teams would be impacted

And how exactly do you think ads get served?

Poorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein. Sometimes with additional overhead referred to as "targeting" which gives a worse outcome and user experience, regardless, over simpler implementations that serve to inform. Targeting forgets causality, typically.

Next comes YELLING-LOUDLY-TO-COME-DOWN-TO-THE-LOCAL-CAR-DEALERSHIP-FOR-NO-MONEY-DOWN-OFFERS phase of advertisements, which type are also routinely and nearly uniformly ignored.

Sounds like you should start a trillion dollar ad business! Or if you're worried about ethics start a "niche" billion dollar ad business that only serves ethical ads!

> Poorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein

Is Google using JS for the backend ad serving / AI?

Not sure. I'm referring to Front End, however, since the advertisee does not see the backend.

Flutter team (Front End), was also axed.

Adtech used AI to make money before it was cool. You wouldn't believe how many ML models are required to build those shitty little pieces of HTML.

Everybody used AI before it was cool. In fact people avoided the very term AI because it was uncool.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#AI_winter_of_the_199...

> Many researchers in AI in the mid 2000s deliberately called their work by other names, such as informatics, machine learning, analytics, knowledge-based systems, business rules management, cognitive systems, intelligent systems, intelligent agents or computational intelligence, to indicate that their work emphasizes particular tools or is directed at a particular sub-problem. Although this may be partly because they consider their field to be fundamentally different from AI, it is also true that the new names help to procure funding by avoiding the stigma of false promises attached to the name "artificial intelligence".[49][50]