Kawasaki Heavy Industries has pulled the covers off perhaps the most outrageous concept vehicle we’ve ever seen. The Corleo is a two-seater quadruped robot you steer with your body, capable of picking its way through rough terrain thanks to AI vision.

I mean look, sure, you could go buy yourself a horse. But some horses are very cheeky, and have you seen what comes out the back end of those things? All that’ll come out the back of the Corleo robot is fresh, clean water as a combustion product from its clean-burning, 150cc, hydrogen-fueled generator engine. Possibly chilled water, from an underslung dispenser – that’d be nice on a mountain picnic.

This is the latest concept vehicle from Kawasaki Heavy Industries – not the motorcycle division specifically, and I’m OK with that. I think the parent company would be wise to keep this machine far from any “Ninja” stickers that might give its AI brain the idea that it should learn martial arts.

So-called “memristors” consume extremely little power and behave similarly to brain cells. Researchers from Jülich, led by Ilia Valov, have now introduced novel memristive components that offer significant advantages over previous versions: they are more robust, function across a wider voltage range, and can operate in both analog and digital modes. These properties could help address the problem of “catastrophic forgetting,” where artificial neural networks abruptly forget previously learned information.

The problem of catastrophic forgetting occurs when deep neural networks are trained for a new task. This is because a new optimization simply overwrites a previous one. The brain does not have this problem because it can apparently adjust the degree of synaptic change; something experts call “metaplasticity.”

They suspect that it is only through these different degrees of plasticity that our brain can permanently learn new tasks without forgetting old content. The new memristor accomplishes something similar.

Word-of-mouth growth has helped turn a 60-person startup into one of the early hits of the generative AI era.

New research from Stanford suggests artificial intelligence isn’t ruled by just OpenAI and Google, as competition increases across the US, China, and France.