It's not hard to outperform the "conventional HTM approach", because it does not work (yet). They tested face recognition performance on 3 very old datasets (AR, ORL, and Yale), and reported accuracy of 83%-86%. To provide some perspective, these datasets have been solved at least a decade ago (> 99% accuracy) [1]

But wait, have they built some cool analog hardware with memristors? Nope, just SPICE simulations...

So yeah, from Kazakhstan, the land of Borat, with love! (sorry, couldn't resist).

[1] http://www.coxlab.org/pdfs/ECCV_PintoDiCarloCox_2008.pdf