Unless I am misunderstanding you then I don't think this is correct. Chain of thought was first proposed in 2022. Assuming you mean reasoning models then the correct comparison is GPT-o1, which came out in September 2024, 2 months prior to R1 lite preview. In the next 2 months, prior to the release of the full R1 model, both qwen and gemini released reasoning models. Dario explicitly notes in early 2025 that most major labs had been working on reasoning models in 2024, and explicitly credits OAI for pulling things forward with their release.

https://darioamodei.com/post/on-deepseek-and-export-controls

> In 2024, the idea of using reinforcement learning (RL) to train models to generate chains of thought has become a new focus of scaling. Anthropic, DeepSeek, and many other companies (perhaps most notably OpenAI who released their o1-preview model in September) have found that this training greatly increases performance on certain select, objectively measurable tasks like math, coding competitions, and on reasoning that resembles these tasks.