I think the issue here was with the term genius, which makes it sounds like what was a completely new paradigme and revolutionary.

OpenAIs success mainly stems from extremely well executed previous concepts while mostly ignoring cost. And as they're pretty much the most successful public player in this domain, they've got the first-mover advantage which they're currently very succesfully leveraging. At least thats how it looks from the perspecitve of an armchair analysts, which wouldn't have been able to achieve the same -- even if I had the same resources and time.

The actual result is absolutely incredible however, regardless wherever the road to this end was genius or not

I don't think anything about high-performance GPT models is standard, since they are only a couple years old and only a handful of organizations have developed them

The technique in question has little to do with GPT itself; it involves using ML to generate more training data in an automated fashion, creating a generative training loop, which as another commenter mentioned, is also the basis behind general adversarial networks.

Compare it to Generative Adversarial Networks. (There are parallels - pun not initially intended.)