These are not independent hypotheses. If (b) is true it decreases the possibility that (a) is true and vice versa.

The dependency here is that if Sam Altman is indeed a con man, it is reasonable to assume that he has in fact conned many people who then report an over inflated metric on the usefulness of the stuff they just bought (people don’t like to believe they were conned; cognitive dissonance).

In other words, if Sam Altman is indeed a con man, it is very likely that most metrics of the usefulness of his product is heavily biased.