Think about that. I wanted to spend money. I wasn't too fussy what it was. Amazon has a decade of my purchasing and browsing history.
And they still failed.
That ONE TIME I buy a unicorn dress for my 2 year old daughter? That's a lifetime of unicorn related merchandise adverts and recommendations for you!
So they gave up trying to match CPU with GPU and went back to connecting beer to diapers.
The ultimate goal of the advertising is return on investment, not making you feel interested in the adverts. If, to exaggerate the possibility, 100% of "people who look at tech" are 0% influenced by adverts, but 10% of "people who bought a unicorn thing" will go on to buy another if they're constantly reminded that whoever they bought it for likes unicorns, all of a sudden it would make sense despite being counterintuitive to viewers.
A more commonly discussed example of a similar thing is that it's easy to think "I just bought a (dishwasher, keyboard, etc), I obviously already have one so why am I seeing adverts for them?" Sure, it might be that the company responsible has an incomplete profile and doesn't know you bought one already. But it's also possible that the % of people who just bought the item and then decide they don't like it, return it and buy a different type is high enough to be worth advertising to them.
For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me, which is remarkable considering what they've got. Google is only very marginally better. Actually, now that I think about it, Amazon's 'customer's also bought' is also pretty bad at the recommendation itself since it not uncommonly recommends incompatible things! ...but it does often succeed at getting me to think more about what else I might need and sometimes leads me to buying other things. At least it's not always recommending the same thing, but rather related things, which is probably a much better way to advertise.
Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose targeting criteria. You as an advertiser have a myriad of options. For example if you've built a competitor to X, you can target users who've visited X recently, aged N-M, residing in countries A, B and C, and so on. There are options with broader interests too. Poorly targeted ad means poorly selected criteria by the advertiser (or sometimes just advertiser experimenting) and consequently money wasted. Facebook doesn't care though.
Then there is retargeting/remarketing (target bounced traffic) already mentioned here is probably the stupidest looking invention that actually works.
I mean, if I could stop seeing washing machines or whatever, I'd probably click it.
You can also block ads (Ublock/Umatrix)
* They don't have suppression set up
* They're using a conversion tracking platform that is slow
* They're testing the returns conversion hypothesis: you have expressed concrete intent, you have bought the product. If it has 5% return rate, you probably still want it, and there's a 5% chance they need to be in the mix.
They show me similar things to the thing I just put in my cart. Sometimes better choices that I made.
They also show related things that other people have bought, that many times I end up purchasing.
You can accomplish that with relational algebra on a precomputed data warehouse job and only for products with strong correlation. The intelligence of the customers is enough agency to instil a semblance of intelligence in the data.
I'm doubtful we'll see an ai that makes a serious jump without directly interacting with the world we live in. Under that measure cars might be the closest since you learn to interact with the bounds of where it can and can't go is similar to a toddler learning to crawl.