"... most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better."
I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent.
I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent.
Small adjustments to a huge system can have huge impact: http://norvig.com/speech.html