The training techniques are a breakthrough no matter what data is used. It's not up for debate, it's an empirical question with a concrete answer. They can and did train orders of magnitude faster.

Not arguing with your point about training efficiency, but the degree to which R1 is a technical breakthrough changes if they were calling an outside API to get the answers, no?

It seems like the difference between someone doing a better writeup of (say) Wiles' proof vs. proving Fermat's Last Theorem independently.

That outside API used to be humans, doing the work manually. Now we have ways to speed that up.

R1 is--as far as we know from good ol' ClosedAI--far more efficient. Even if it were a "clone", A) that would be a terribly impressive achievement on its own that Anthropic and Google would be mighty jealous of, and B) it's at the very least a distillation of O1's reasoning capabilities into a more svelte form.