Saying ‘please’, ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT costs OpenAI millions of dollars, reveals CEO

Being polite towards AI chatbots like ChatGPT, and showing them respect by saying “please” and “thank you”, costs the company millions of dollars, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed.

The revelation came in response to an X user who asked how much energy and money was lost due to people being polite to AI, to which Altman said it was “tens of millions of dollars well spent”.

According to experts, being kind to AI chatbots helps them generate better replies. Kurtis Beavers, the design manager at Microsoft, pointed out that courteous cues could result in the AI providing more courteous and cooperative responses.


As per a 2024 study, 67% of American users were courteous to chatbots, with 55% stating that it was the correct thing to do and 12% doing so in case of an “AI revolt in the future”.

However, even little modifications like additional sentences raise processing costs as ChatGPT and other generative AI models demand a lot of power amid an enormous number of requests sent every day.

As per a joint research by The Washington Post and the University of California, it takes 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity to create a single 100-word AI-generated email, which is equivalent to the power of 14 LED lights for an hour. That's 7.5 kWh for a single weekly email over a year.

Data centers that house these systems already consume around 2% of the world's power, and this percentage is predicted to rise as AI becomes more widespread.