Polite AI Prompts Are Costing OpenAI Millions—But Users Say It’s Worth It

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an unexpected revelation this week that stirred both amusement and debate across tech circles: users typing “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT are costing the company tens of millions of dollars. The comment came during a interaction on X, where Altman responded to a query about the financial weight of polite phrasing. “Tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know,” he quipped, acknowledging the hefty expense while hinting at the long-term unknowns of AI evolution. Users Courteous to an Algorithm The exchange sparked broader questions beyond just dollars and cents. Why are OpenAI users being courteous to an algorithm? For some, it’s a practical hedge against a speculative future where AI becomes sentient and remembers how we treated it. For others, like software engineer Carl Youngblood, it’s about something much more grounded: “Treating AIs with courtesy is a moral imperative for me… Callousness in our daily interactions causes our interpersonal skills to atrophy,” he explained . A December 2024 survey by Future showed that 67% of Americans are polite to AI assistants. While 55% say it’s simply the right thing to do, another 12% admit they’re just playing it safe—fearful that rude behavior could someday come back to bite. OpenAI Energy Cost Behind the Kindness But politeness isn’t just a social quirk—it has a carbon footprint. A 2023 study by Alex de Vries, known for his critiques of Bitcoin’s energy use, estimated that each ChatGPT query uses about three watt-hours of electricity. That might not sound like much, but scale that across millions of queries—especially those padded with niceties—and the total power draw becomes significant. Others, however, challenge that figure. Data analyst Josh You of Epoch AI argues the number is closer to 0.3 watt-hours per query, thanks to increasingly efficient models and hardware . Still, one user asked a pointed question in response to Altman’s post: why doesn’t OpenAI filter out unneeded courtesy words to cut down costs? Altman, meanwhile, noted that the cost of AI output has been dropping rapidly—tenfold each year, in fact. Even so, the company doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until 2029. Until then, OpenAI is betting big on scale, projecting $12.7 billion in revenue this year and over $125 billion by the end of the decade. The post Polite AI Prompts Are Costing OpenAI Millions—But Users Say It’s Worth It appeared first on TheCoinrise.com .

Source: The Coin Rise