I wonder how often this happens in practice - by "this", I mean industry/LLM world not noticing* some research until a bigger player repeats it with louder PR.

(*hopefully I didn't misunderstand the situation)

Ask Jürgen Schmidhuber

If we go only by the cases that have been publicly known it already happens all the time. Lots of patents are a race to register by multiple parties too and it's rarely done fairly.