I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all.

I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.

I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?

lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with

Pure, shameless clickbait as usual from Smithsonian magazine.

> Although there is no direct evidence that the adaptation is linked to expanded octopus brainpower,

I.e. the entire connection between this mutation and octopus intelligence is made up. Not even a shred of justification.

Correlation does not imply causation and it's not even clear this qualifies as correlation.