ah yeah, the intelligence claim was basically an afterthought in the actual paper, the smithsonian mag did a bad job with their reporting. the paper is just called: 'Evolution of a core ribosomal innovation in octopus', and I would argue the E coli thing is far from a non-sequitur in that context

the cross-organism increase in fidelity is pretty damn shocking. Ribosomes are one of the most optimized, slow-evolving things out there, and transplanting genes from animals to coli is already a very checkered endeavor.