Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, has for many years now been among the most prominent over-inflators of expectations and fears around the technology we have come to refer to as artificial intelligence. (I put it like this because to even use this term, as unavoidable as it has become, is to be complicit in this over-inflation.) As the public face of the company that makes ChatGPT, and which has thereby become synonymous with this understanding of AI, Altman’s job is to project to the world in general, and to investors in particular, a vision of a...