ChatGPT spends ‘tens of millions of dollars’ on people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but Sam Altman says it’s worth it
- OpenAI CEO says saying “Please” or “Thank You” to ChatGPT costs the company ‘Tens of millions of dollars’
- A Future survey found that roughly 70% of people are polite to AI
- Experts believe being polite to AI is actually beneficial to the responses you receive, but at what cost?
Do you say “Please” or “Thank you” to ChatGPT? If you’re polite to OpenAI’s chatbot, you could be part of the user base costing the company “Tens of millions of dollars” on electricity bills.
User @tomiinlove wrote on X, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, responded, “Tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know.” Thanks for lowering the world’s anxiety around an AI uprising, Sam. We’ll all be sure to waste even more energy by saying “Please” or “Thank You” from now on.
In February, Future PLC, the company that owns TechRadar, compiled a survey of more than 1,000 people on their AI etiquette. The survey found that around 70% of people are polite to AI when interacting with it, with 12% being polite in case of a robot uprising.
Obviously, there’s an energy cost when using ChatGPT, which has massive AI-powered servers that run the whole operation. But as these tools thrive in popularity, are most of us even aware that one simple message, or one AI-generated meme, is impacting the planet?
TechRadar reached out to OpenAI for comment, we’ll update this story when we hear back.
Should we be polite to AI?
If being polite to AI can have such an impact on energy consumption, should we even bother being nice to ChatGPT?
Presumably, these ‘Tens of millions of dollars’ Altman speaks of are due to users saying “Please” or “Thank You” in a contained message rather than at the end of a prompt. Hopefully, OpenAI will respond to our query to give us more of an understanding of how people frame these particular messages.
TechRadar writer Becca Caddy stopped saying thanks to ChatGPT and found that being polite to an AI chatbot might actually help with responses.
In her article, she wrote, “Polite, well-structured prompts often lead to better responses, and in some cases, they may even reduce bias. That’s not just a bonus – it’s a critical factor in AI reliability.
As AI evolves, it will be fascinating to see whether politeness itself becomes a built-in feature. Could AI favor users who communicate respectfully? Will models be trained to respond differently based on etiquette?”
So while it may not be energy-efficient, being polite to AI could in fact give you a better experience while interacting with ChatGPT. But is it worth the environmental cost?
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