This question is malformed, imo. Every lab is doing derivative work. OpenAI didn’t invent transformers, Google did. Google didn’t invent neural networks or back propagation.

If you mean whether OAI could have prevented DS from succeeding by cutting off their API access, probably not. Maybe they used OAI for supervised fine tuning in certain domains, like creative writing, which are difficult to formally verify (although they claim to have used one of their own models). Or perhaps during human preference tuning at the end. But either way, there are many roads to Rome, and OAI wasn’t the only game in town.

Point is, those future advances are worthless. Eventually anybody will be able to feed each other's data for the training.

There's no moat here. LLMs are commodities.