There are other animals (mammals) that have better memory than us. There are animals strongly suspected to have deeper and more sophisticated social relationships than us. We are not the apex in every intellectual ability, but the ones in which we are grant us absolute power over the future of all other lifeforms.
A cognitive entity does not have to best you at all things. There are standardized education tests it may never reach above 10th percentile on, just as humans will never reach above 10th percentile in the short term memory tasks that apes are masters of. But we are the 100th percentile for tasks like industrialized destruction of them and their habitats and capturing and using them for painful medical experiments - the apes are wholly outclassed when it comes to that.