The community is ridiculously fast at submitting segments IME, especially on tech-oriented channels. Tubular even allows you to submit segments right from within the app which is really handy.
I feel the benefits of automatically detecting them (AI or otherwise) would be easier to realize at a larger scale - sounds really interesting though. Training such a thing probably wouldn't be too difficult seeing as we have a massive library of timestamps in Sponsorblock's database
Thanks for sharing, provided some insight into how YT is doing this.
Seems very easy to bypass if they're just swapping in new TS HLS/DASH segments, the harder part will be identifying what segments are part of the video and what segments are ads sliced in