There are two issues: 1. Will memristors give a performance improvement? Yes, they probably will. Will this be helpful to AI? Yes, it will, because at least so

There are two issues: 1. Will memristors give a performance improvement? Yes, they probably will. Will this be helpful to AI? Yes, it will, because at least some aspects of AI are limited by performance right now. 2. Are memristors particularly well suited to modeling the brain? Though there are small scale similarities, I think this is akin to saying a mechanical computer based on gears turning is uniquely suited to doing CAD for automobiles, or a wooden keyboard helps with furniture design. The brain consists of a huge number of slow processing elements. Electronic computers consist of orders of magnitude fewer processing elements running orders of magnitude faster. Even if we approach AI from neuron-level simulations, we're better off using the ~1000 floating point op per second per transistor to simulate a set of neurons serially than to waste 5 or 10 memristors per neuron and enormous interconnect bandwidth to try to build an electronic analogue of the brain. Edit: You quoted one thing I said, but you cut the crucial word "pure". If memristors are uniquely suited to AI, then this is not a "pure consequence of performance improvements". When I say that I mean that performance is fungible. Memristors or transistors doesn't matter for brains any more than it matters for high frequency trading or rendering graphics.