overfitting

This note last modified May 21, 2026

When an AI system is too specialized for its training data, which ironically makes it worse for general, real world tasks.

e.g. An AI training to differentiate dog pictures vs wolf pictures might accidentally overfocus on the snow that’s often in the back of wolf photos. Then, in the real world, it’ll make its decision based on snow rather than the features of the dog / wolf.