In the age of GenAI, why do we still need good models?

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud says models can guide artificial intelligence through regime shifts and away from overfitting

My last column was a plea for good models – models that improve our understanding of what is really going on behind the scenes and help us build a faithful intuition of the underlying phenomena. Their purpose is not merely to mimic reality, but to make it intelligible. 

But proponents of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) challenge this view. Since models are – or at least should be – based