Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replicating something exactly is a lot harder than making something that does the same thing in a different way. We can build planes that travel far faster than a bird could but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to exactly replicate how a bird flies, so I don’t think this says anything about how far away we are from a superintelligence
This. Submarines don't swim like fish, airplanes don't fly like birds and cars don't run like gepards. Edit: I am surprised at the downvotes. In general, we learn from the nature, but aping it usually proved too difficult and often unpractical at the same time. Do we really want to replicate worm intelligence for practical purposes, or do we want something different? I would say that a machine which can, say, analyze…
This is not true for how this 302 cell organism works. We don't know and struggle to understand. That's actually the reason why the project exists. To find out how everything works with an bottom-up approach.
While we may find shortcuts or even superior forms of intelligence without understanding how intelligence works in biological creatures, it is still curious how we struggle even with a "simple" organism like C.elegans.