UCLA-PIONEERED NANOWIRE NETWORKS PHYSICALLY REWIRE THEMSELVES TO COMPUTE, NO SOFTWARE NEURAL NETWORK REQUIRED

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

A new paper in Nature Reviews Physics covers self-organizing nanowire and nanoparticle networks, first built at UCLA in 2011, where the material's physical structure acts as the neural network instead of running one in software on a chip. Individual nanowires act like neurons, and the connections between them act like synapses, growing stronger with repeated use and fading without it, similar to memory and forgetting in the brain, so the hardware itself learns rather than just running a fixed program.