In further news vindicating neurosymbolic AI and world models, after Demis Hassabis’s strong statements yesterday, Yann LeCun, historically hostile to symbolic approaches, has just joined what sounds like a neurosymbolic AI company focused on reasoning and world models, apparently built on pretty much the same kind of blueprint as laid out in 2020.

Given how much grief LeCun has given me over the years, this is an astonishing development, and yet another sign that Silicon Valley is desperately seeking alternatives to pure LLMs — and at long last open to a reorienting around the mix of neurosymbolic AI, reasoning, and world models that scholars such as myself have long recommended.

It’s also yet more vindication for Judea Pearl, and his tireless promotion of causal reasoning. It might be a great day to reread his Book of Why, and my own Rebooting AI (with Ernest Davis), both of which anticipated aspects of the current moment years in advance.