This happens all the time, even without AI. Other researchers or PhD students can publish the same results before you. I say that based on my experience during my PhD.
Yes and no. It's pretty normal for students to get scooped, sometimes even multiple times (ask me how I know...).
It's much less common for students to have their entire thesis direction removed from under them, as might be the case for someone working in fine-grained complexity assuming 3SUM has no subquadratic algorithms, or working assuming ~UGC. Both of which (publicly) seemed like perfectly valid research directions until a couple hours ago.
There might be stuff to salvage from their conditional results anyway, but this is not your average scooping.
Yes and no. It's pretty normal for students to get scooped, sometimes even multiple times (ask me how I know...).
It's much less common for students to have their entire thesis direction removed from under them, as might be the case for someone working in fine-grained complexity assuming 3SUM has no subquadratic algorithms, or working assuming ~UGC. Both of which (publicly) seemed like perfectly valid research directions until a couple hours ago.
There might be stuff to salvage from their conditional results anyway, but this is not your average scooping.