alt Hacker NewsBeing scooped is not a new phenomenon, but the scooper's story is almost always that they were working on the problem independently or had some independent insight into it. By OpenAI's own account, they were inspired to start working on this by rumors that there might be Millennium Prize solutions to scoop.
Research projects don't start in a vacuum.
It never happens that you wake up one morning and start working on a new problem that came to you in a dream (*unless you are Ramanujan).
This is business as usual for academia, it's amusing to the discussion over it.