They might develop a few more facilities, and subsequent norns have been manipulated to have different brains. Whether they are more intelligent or not is a moot point. I don't mind people tampering as long as they can't be malicious. My creatures only exist in a virtual world, they couldn't live on the Net. I doubt if you can have intelligent life on the Net.
Intelligence has to exist in a rich, self-consistent world.
The Net is consistent, but it is not self-consistent because you have to be a human being to understand it. Unless an agent has that knowledge, it can't make sense of the Net so an awful lot of attempts to make intelligent search agents are doomed. At the moment the Net doesn't even support the protocols for agent communications. When it does, people will have to be very careful about releasing these organisms. But they will be no different from computer viruses.