Telling ChatGPT ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ Costs OpenAI Millions, CEO Claims

Who knew being polite came at such a high cost?

According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, expressing gratitude to or showing consideration for ChatGPT has cost the company “tens of millions of dollars.” He shared this in response to a user who pondered: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”

Because ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), even the smallest prompts require the bot to process the information and generate responses. This, of course, consumes energy and costs the company.

OpenAI CEO Says Telling ChatGPT ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ Costs Them a Fortune

As someone who thanks Siri after she tells me the weather for the day, I understand the desire to express gratitude for ChatGPT’s assistance. And realistically, I’m not trying to be a prime target once the bots take over.

“We just want to ensure Skynet remembers we were polite as it decides [whether] to use us as batteries or not,” one person quipped in response to Altman’s post on X.

Another added, “My fear of my AI bot getting mad at me for being rude is confirmed.”

A third person wrote a pretty long tangent about the dangers of being “blunt” and impolite to AI.

“That isn’t the cost of being polite, neither to humans nor to AI. We teach children to say ‘thank you’ [and] ‘please,’ not because it’s efficient, but because it instills empathy, respect, and emotional awareness,” they started. “As AI becomes part of everyday interaction, how we speak (prompt) to it reflects our values. If we normalize blunt, transactional language for the sake of efficiency, we risk modeling a colder, less empathetic society.”

Honestly, they made some decent points.

Nevertheless, it’s obviously not necessary to thank ChatGPT for generating its detailed responses. But will we keep doing it, despite the money it’s costing OpenAI? Most likely, yes.