OpenAI pays a lot of money for being polite with ChatGPT

When you add "Please" or "Thank you" to a request, ChatGPT servers consume a little more electricity. According to OpenAI's CEO, this courtesy has already cost the company tens of millions of dollars, but he believes it is money well spent.

TechRadar writes about it.

How much does a "Please" really cost for OpenAI?

The X platform user @tomiinlove wondered how much money OpenAI spends on electricity because people are polite to the AI bot.

"Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know," Sam Altman answered.

His comment ironically reassured those worried about the possible revolt of machines, but instead pushed the community to use polite formulas even more actively.

In February, a survey of over a thousand people was conducted on the etiquette of communicating with AI. About 70% of respondents admitted that they always remain polite, and another 12% explained their politeness as a fear of a "robot uprising". Although each request to ChatGPT is only a few bytes of text, it is backed by powerful servers that consume significant amounts of energy. The danger is that the rapid growth in the popularity of AI services increases the overall energy consumption, and most users do not even think that another meme or a single word of gratitude also leaves a carbon footprint.

The journalists assume that Altman's "tens of millions" refers to cases where "Please" or "Thank you" is sent as a separate message, rather than added at the end of a large post.

The TechRadar writer Becca Caddy conducted her own experiment: she stopped thanking ChatGPT and made sure that polite, clearly worded requests still provide better results and sometimes even reduce the model's bias. In her opinion, as AI develops, politeness may turn into a built-in "recommendation factor": bots are likely to give preference to users who follow etiquette.

As a reminder, OpenAI has updated ChatGPT's memory. Now, the chatbot can analyse all previous user dialogues and take into account the context of past conversations.

We also wrote that OpenAI has made the new ChatGPT image generator available to everyone. Previously, only paid users of the service had access to the new feature.