I'd often jokingly mention an idea, only for someone to get a state-of-the-art paper out of the exact same idea within a year of that. It annoyed me at first, but with time, I realized that this was a rather familiar occurrence.
Many top labs are tight-lipped even when talking about peripheral topics, because so many of their peers are within months of reaching the same answer, and even the smallest hint might lead to a peer getting there first. My conversations with top researchers indicate that all research in ML is about 'getting there first' rather than producing something that requires a mythical epiphany.
It does take away from the glamor of it a little bit. If Salieri had been months away from composing Mozart's best work himself, that would have taken away from the timelessness of his work.
Modern Calculus can be reasonably thought of as the most important mathematical leap forward of the last 1000 years. If there was ever an invention that can be considered a piece of unquestionable genius, then that's calculus. And somehow, it was simultaneously invented by 2 different people within a few years of each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...
Worse, we started a business and scoured around, looking to see if anyone had ever tried it. A little over a year in, we realize someone else had started it, two years before us, but with slightly different terminology. Fortunately, but we're both still around and kicking over a decade later, though with a good understanding now of why not many other folks had tried it.
A friend was discussing how her cat loved to be with her 100% of the time, but when she took a shower, the cat was distressed.
In a moment of cleverness, I suggested the obvious solution: a cat raincoat.
Then I searched the web and found lots of cat raincoats.
It is really amazing to see how many discoveries and inventions I've heard of were independently made by two or more people within a few years of each other.