Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm reading the article and it's talking about solving analogies, antonyms and similar problems ... as found on a standard IQ test. I understand this isn't intelligence and the title doesn't imply it but I'm not sure what your reference to decoding is about.
But it still seems like pattern recognition based on a training set only, which is, in my opinion, a task on a lever prior to intelligence, like what visual cortex does. It cannot make new reference between words to produce (infer) new antonyms and analogies (not presented in a training g set), which is intelligence.
The test they use to see if it actually learned what these words meant, in a limited sense, is to test it against a subset of verbal IQ tests (not what it was trained on!). You could ask it the antonym, synonym, or analogy for anything in English. This is an extension of word2vec / word embeddings.
That it beats the scores of college graduates impresses me.