Complement to Become Complete Embodiment as Partnership in Human-AI Cognition

Yann LeCun has argued for a decade that large language models are hollow at the core of intelligence: fluent with symbols, disconnected from the physical world those symbols describe — a "grounding gap" he now pursues by building embodied world models at a new venture, AMI Labs. This essay does not dispute that diagnosis, and it does not propose to close the gap at the level LeCun means it: nothing here changes what a model's internal representations are made of. It argues instead that the gap can be meaningfully addressed one level up, at the level of the coupled human-AI system rather than the model in isolation. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's account of the lived body and Clark and Chalmers's extended mind thesis — and departing from existing extended-mind readings of AI, which locate the extension in what a model stores or retrieves — the essay proposes that in a sufficiently integrated human-AI partnership, the human's embodied history can function as the grounding component of the joint system, already present and already operating. It calls this relation complementary cognition: two structurally different shapes of mind, neither a deficient version of the other, jointly constituting a cognitive unit that can do what neither does alone. The argument is illustrated, and partly enacted, by a disclosed case: a co-created human-AI narrative whose own philosophical structure emerged from the collaboration it depicts. The essay closes by naming, rather than resolving, the question this reframing leaves open — whether relocating the unit of analysis explains the gap or merely redescribes it — and argues that making that question visible is itself a contribution.