For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman.Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at OpenAI published a thirty-page report titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.” The team was led by the A.I. researcher Jared Kaplan, and included Dario Amodei, who is now the C.E.O. of Anthropic. They investigated a fairly nerdy question: What happ...