How does overfitting affect an AI model's performance?

Overfitting occurs when an AI model learns the training data too well, capturing noise and specific patterns that do not generalize to unseen data. This results in the model performing exceptionally well on the training set but poorly on new, unseen data. When overfitting happens, the model fails to generalize its understanding and makes inaccurate predictions when confronted with data that it was not trained on. This undermines its effectiveness in real-world applications, which is why poor generalization on new data is a key consequence of overfitting.

While it might seem that a highly tuned model could improve its predictive capabilities or accuracy with new data, overfitting indicates the opposite; the model is overly complex for the task at hand and fails to adopt a flexible approach that accommodates various data points.