Yeah, well Alibaba nearly (and sometimes) beat GPT-4 with a comparatively microscopic model you can run on a desktop. And released a whole series of them. For free! With a tiny fraction of the GPUs any of the American trainers have.
Bigger is not better, but OpenAI has also just lost their creative edge, and all Altman's talk about scaling up training with trillions of dollars is a massive con.
o1 is kind of a joke, CoT and reflection strategies have been known for awhile. You can do it for free youself, to an extent, and some models have tried to finetune this in: https://github.com/codelion/optillm
But one sad thing OpenAI has seemingly accomplished is to "salt" the open LLM space. Theres way less hacky experimentation going on than there used to be, which makes me sad, as many of its "old" innovations still run circles around OpenAI.