Even if that narrative is true, they were still undercut by DeepSeek. Maybe DeepSeek couldn't have succeeded without o1, but then it should have been even easier for OpenAI to do what DeepSeek did, since they have better access to o1.
This argument would excuse many kinds of intellectual property theft. "The person whose work I stole didn't deserve to have it protected, because I took their first draft and made a better second draft. Why didn't they just skip right to the second draft, like me?"
