it's very possible they only had to use the massive compute budget because they were trying to plagiarize his work before he published it though, e.g. autonomously do things in ~7 days what he had likely been thinking about for ~1 year.
The most nefarious explanation seems to be that they got wind it was possible to solve NS via LLMs and perhaps a small nudge in the right direction.
The open question was whether their LLM got the nudge in the right direction because it got access to the chat somehow (e.g. automated training that scraped his chat logs) or just a high level "Navier stokes can be solved through LLM". It sounds like the former may have happened although right now we just have an accusation and a weak denial.
The compute was used to leapfrog the human team, using their ideas and pushing them to a solution of the general problem.
Plagiarism isn’t being used in the literal sense.