The thing they previewed back in December before the whole Deepseek kerfuffle this week?

Don't get me wrong, I'm laughing at OpenAI just like everyone else, but if they were really copying Deepseek, they'd be releasing a smaller model distilled from Deepseek API responses, and have it be open source to boot. This is neither

o3 was announced in December. R1 arguably builds off the rumored approach of o1 (LLM + RL) although with major efficiency gains. I'm not a big fan of OpenAI but it's the other way around.