Nah, o1 has been out how long? They are already on o3 in the office.
It’s completely normal a year later for someone to copy their work and publish it.
It probably cost them less because they probably just distilled o1 XD. Or might have gotten insider knowledge (but honestly how hard could CoT fine tuning possibly be?)
Well the uncensored fine tuning dataset is oss
https://huggingface.co/datasets/Guilherme34/uncensor