With slightly different cherry-picking, you could equally well claim that DeepSeek couldn't ship a reasoning model until they copied the idea from OpenAI's o1-preview, and they also copied MoEs from Google Brain/Jagellonian University https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06538 way back in 2017, too!

But ultimately these were ideas floating around in the air, if one group hadn't done the experiment, someone else would have.