Sam Altman Admits That Saying “Please” and “Thank You” to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power – futurism.com
2025-04-19T13:00:03Z
Sam Altman says OpenAI is spending “tens of millions of dollars” processing chatbot queries made with proper etiquette.
If chivalry isn’t already dead, it’s certainly circling the drain.
OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying “please” and “thank you” to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.
When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter wondered aloud “how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models,” Altman chimed in, saying it’s “tens of millions of dollars well spent.”
“You never know,” he added.
While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it’s an important move. Microsoft’s design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, says proper etiquette “helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs.”
“Using polite language sets a tone for the response,” Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider “artificial intelligence” might more accurately be described as “prediction machines,” like your phone’s predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.
“When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back,” a Microsoft WorkLab memo notes. “Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide.”
A late 2024 survey found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it “because it’s the right thing to do,” while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.
That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we’ll ever build a truly “intelligent” algorithm, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those “pleases” and “thank yous” are adding up, bigtime.
One Washington Post investigation, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you’d use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour’s worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.
Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we’re feeding chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly low-impact.
While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about 2 percent of the world’s energy consumption, a number that’s likely to skyrocket as AI floods every corner of daily life.
So if you’re mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — and your brain — will thank you.
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