"using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring" is imo mealy wording: it seems fairly likely that OA heard Buckmaster and Alpoge were close to a breakthrough, and decided to use their unlimited compute to quickly prompt based on their assumptions about B&As work.
Citation of what? this was unpublished work! This computational blitz really just reads as "might makes right" on OpenAi's part... which isn't surprising, but they should probably be honest about what they've done here.
