And this is based on what exactly? OpenAI hides the reasoning steps, so training a model on o1 is very likely much more expensive (and much less useful) than just training it directly on a cheaper model.
R1's biggest contribution IMO, is R1-Zero, I am fully sold with this they don't need o1's output to be as good. But yeah, o1 is still the herald.
Like, this idea always seemed completely obvious to me, and I figured the only reason why it hadn't been done yet is just because (at the time) models weren't good enough. (So it just caused them to get confused, and it didn't improve results.)
Presumably OpenAI were the first to claim this achievement because they had (at the time) the strongest model (+ enough compute). That doesn't mean COT was a revolutionary idea, because imo it really wasn't. (Again, it was just a matter of having a strong enough model, enough context, enough compute for it to actually work. That's not an academic achievement, just a scaling victory.)