Generative artificial intelligence models are rooted in ideas of mid-20th-century engineers who thought some amount of irrationality was essential for a machine that could think like a human, contends Benjamin Lindquist, an assistant professor in the MIT History Section, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.Generative artificial intelligence models are rooted in ideas of mid-20th-century engineers who thought some amount of irrationality was essential for a machine that could think like a human, contends Benjamin Lindquist, an assistant professor in the MIT History Section, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.[#item_full_content]