This is really interesting work, but I feel like the way the article summarizes it is getting it wrong.

First Single Device To Act Like a Neuron

One thing that’s kept engineers from copying the brain’s power efficiency and quirky computational skill is the lack of an electronic device that can, all on its own, act like a neuron. It would take a special kind of device to do that, one whose behavior is more complex than any yet created.

This is just getting it wrong. Modern neural networks run as vectorized operations on a GPU. They are efficient because they do not use a single device to act like a single neuron, they can do massively parallelized work by optimizing for the hardware we have. If we had memristors, it doesn't seem like GPUs are the first thing they'd replace. More likely they would replace some sort of memory, since what makes them unique is storing information rather than performing analog operations faster.