Once you know that OpenAI gets a certain set of results with roughly technology X, it's much easier to recreate that work than to do it in the first place.

This is true of most technology. Inventing the telephone is something, but if you told a competent engineer the basic idea, they'd be able to do it 50 years earlier no problem.

Same with flight. There are some really tricky problems with counter-intuitive answers (like how stalls work and how turning should work; which still mess up new pilots today). The space of possible answers is huge, and even the questions themselves are very unclear. It took the Wright brothers years of experiments to understand that they were stalling their wing. But once you have the basic questions and their rough answers, any amateur can build a plane today in their shed.