I cant find the part about "faster than AI" in the research paper. It's very difficult to compare. Do you use a single computer or a cluster? Do you compare wall clock time, or energy consumption, or weigh of the processor, or ...?
Me neither, i don't think that was the interesting part about the paper at all, but the fact that they were even able to train a clump of cells to do something is very exciting. Also their finding that human cells work better than mouse cells.
Yeah, I don't think it's mentioned in the paper however in the New Scientist podcast it was alluded to by the lead author that there is currently work being done to compare. I'd reason that they are looking at wall clock time since ML systems can train in no time if done in a batch-accelerated process.