The issue is that we have millions of evolution for living beings, and even us in 2021 aren't the same that were running from Dinosaurs, so it is only natural that other species also enjoy some kind of intelligence, naturally they aren't writing books, however it is a scale from DNA programmed behaviours to some level of self conscience, ability to learn or even develop some kind of culture that is passed across generations.
There is so much to learn from other species on our own planet.
While neural networks themselves are fantastic, are those species anything smarter than that? There's so much to learn from them yes, but I don't think based on this article that spiders would be "smarter than you think".
I don't think they are necessary self-conscious in an intelligent way. I think all of this behaviour can be explained from evolution honing them to have some sort of biases and weights towards this input causing that output.
And it's absolutely fascinating to learn to understand how they became to be the way they are. How environment affected, how all of it was stored in DNA so it can't be reproduced continuously and continuously.
I think level of spider's intelligence doesn't differ that much from what Tesla FSD is for example. Tesla FSD needs quite a bit of honing still of course.
There is so much to learn from other species on our own planet.