A Yann LeCun–Linked Startup Charts a New Path to AGI

As the world’s largest companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into large language models, San Francisco-based Logical Intelligence is trying something different in pursuit of AI that can mimic the human brain.

If you ask Yann LeCun, Silicon Valley has a groupthink problem. Since leaving Meta in November, the researcher and AI luminary has taken aim at the orthodox view that large language models (LLMs) will get us to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the threshold where computers match or exceed human smarts. Everyone, he declared in a recent interview, has been “LLM-pilled.”

On January 21, San Francisco–based startup Logical Intelligence appointed LeCun to its board. Building on a theory conceived by LeCun two decades prior, the startup claims to have developed a different form of AI, better equipped to learn, reason, and self-correct.

Logical Intelligence has developed what’s known as an energy-based reasoning model (EBM). Whereas ...