alt Hacker NewsResearch 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.
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If it's all business as usual and being scooped is no big deal, why was OpenAI in such a rush? They didn't have to launch this effort on the very day they heard the rumor, run "on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents", or try to coordinate announcement scheduling with Buckmaster in the middle of a long weekend. It seems to me that they understood very well this was not a "business as usual" announcement, and devoted huge amounts of money and focus to maximize the chance that they were first.
Apologies if this is against the rules, but could I ask if you have some background in scientific research (maybe you could elaborate lightly on topics you've worked on)?
From my perspective, this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon, but I recognize it's possible that these stories might be more common in other fields. Still, I'd appreciate a strong sign that you aren't making these statements up based on secondhand accounts of what 'academia is usually like'.