- Say “please” and “thank you” to Chat GPT has a real cost in energy consumption and money for OpenAI.
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, estimates that the annual cost of user courtesy is tens of millions of dollars.
- Each additional word processed requires more computational resources, although its impact alone is minimal.
- The debate over these costs reflects both the environmental impact and the ethical and social implications of digital friendliness.
In recent times, many people have wondered whether show good manners with the Artificial Intelligence, especially when addressing ChatGPT, with words like “please” and “thank you,” has some real effect beyond mere symbolism. The curious thing is that digital courtesy, far from being harmless, implies a tangible cost for the companies behind these systems, both in economic terms and in terms of energy impact. The issue has generated much debate, and not just among users: the Sam altman, CEO of OpenAI, has put figures on the table, which has fueled conversation about the true extent of this seemingly harmless phenomenon.
The cost of politeness in the age of IA It's not just a matter of communication styles; it directly affects the amount of resources consumed by each query. Analyzing how large language models, such as those that support ChatGPT, work, shows that Each additional word requires computational processingThus, including polite expressions, even if simply out of politeness, ends up generating millions of requests and, therefore, influencing the company's overall energy consumption and operating costs.
Polite words: a luxury for OpenAI?
When someone writes to ChatGPT including a “please” or a “thank you”, they are adding extra tokens (the minimum units of text that AI processes), which results in additional processing on servers. Sam Altman publicly responded to this question after a user asked on the social network X, pointing out that these interactions They cost OpenAI “tens of millions of dollars well spent” each year.While the figure has a somewhat ironic tone, the reality is that the lump sum becomes a significant expense as millions of users maintain educated habits when interacting with AI.
Is it really that expensive to say hello or thank you? OpenAI's own business model and the inner workings of language models help explain this. Every time we type something—even phrases as short as "hello, thank you"—the system has to split the text into tokens and perform countless computational operations on powerful servers. According to industry experts and analysts, the unit cost of adding courtesy words is minuscule: For example, each such interaction is estimated to increase spending by just $0,0000015. However, at the scale of millions of daily users, Collective courtesy translates into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars each year.
Exact figures vary depending on the source and calculation model, but a reasonable estimate holds that, in electricity alone, the set of polite interactions could represent more than $ 400 per day, accumulating more than $ 140.000 annuallyAlthough these amounts are lower than those mentioned symbolically by Altman, the aggregate expenditure is not trivial when viewed in the context of a global service like ChatGPT.
How is this expense generated? From tokens and energy consumption
The process by which digital courtesy is converted into consumed electricity is simple, although not always obvious to users. OpenAI's systems, like other AI models, decode each word and fragment into tokensThe more tokens a request has, More computing resources—and therefore more energy expenditure—are required to process it and generate a response.
According to verified data from various sources, each query to ChatGPT can mean between 0,3 and 3 watt-hours of electricity, depending on the efficiency of the servers and the type of model used. The difference in range is due to continuous technological advances and the updating of the hardware involved. Although expressions of courtesy do not appear, on the surface, to be a substantial factor, their Massive repetition weighs heavily on OpenAI's electricity bill..
In addition, intensive use of these servers entails extra costs in cooling and water consumptionResearch from American universities has shown that even short responses can consume tens of milliliters of water to cool systems, which, taken to the extreme of millions of daily interactions, adds up to a significant environmental footprint.
This sum of energetic and material factors means that digital courtesy, although positive from a social perspective, has a parallel ecological cost which is now beginning to enter the public debate.
Is it worth being educated by an AI?
The debate is not limited to numbers. Various studies and surveys, such as those conducted by Future and Cornell University, reveal that A majority of users prefer to maintain courtesy even in front of machines. Among the reasons, ethical ones predominate (55% do it “because it’s the right thing to do”) and, to a lesser extent, certain technological fears (12% fear that, in the future, AI will remember who was nice or not).
As to whether it affects the quality of the responses, several investigations agree that Friendly language can foster more empathetic interaction and generate responses perceived as more useful or satisfactory. However, it is also highlighted that Excessive formality does not guarantee better results and that the improvement is more evident in languages such as English or Japanese than in others.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence models themselves have been trained on millions of human conversations, so they tend to replicate the tone of the person speaking to them. So, if a person chooses to be polite, the AI will also respond in that tone, which fosters a friendlier environment—even if the ultimate beneficiary is the user themselves, not the machine.
Economic and environmental impact and future projection
From a financial perspective, OpenAI's expenditure on keeping ChatGPT running is enormous. The sum of all operations (not only polite ones, but also long queries, complex interactions or the use of advanced models) can raise the company's electricity bill to figures of more than one hundred million dollars annually.However, the efficiency of new models and servers is progressively reducing these costs, as Altman points to a tenfold reduction in the cost per query each year thanks to technological advances.
OpenAI projects its revenue to continue growing at a rapid pace—expected to triple to $12.700 billion annually—but it does not anticipate positive cash flow before 2029. This highlights the tension between the global demand for AI tools and the real and environmental costs involved in keeping them running.
In the background, the question of sustainability and ethics runs throughout the discussion. While most believe that digital courtesy has intrinsic value, as it reflects human habits and values even in automated contexts, others raise the need for reconsider these actions if they negatively affect the environment or the AI business model.
Should we stop being polite to chatbots?
Opinions are far from unanimous. While some experts and technology company executives, such as Microsoft's Kurtis Beavers, argue that Maintaining digital education helps set a more pleasant tone in human-computer interactionOthers point out that reducing these formulas could lead to energy savings, albeit symbolic, in a context of growing concern for sustainability.
In short, every "please" and "thank you" addressed to ChatGPT has a cost that goes beyond the purely incidental. The final decision rests with each user: prioritize the human value of courtesy or embrace ecological pragmatism and avoid unnecessary extra words. For now, and as Sam Altman himself points out, The “tens of millions of dollars well spent” in digital courtesy are taken over by OpenAI as an investment in the humanity of its services, even if the bill continues to grow.
Digital courtesy, as simple as a kind word, may seem insignificant when viewed individually, but it takes on a new dimension when millions of people practice it daily with artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. The tension between maintaining good manners and preserving resources demonstrates the extent to which AI is changing the rules of the game—not only technologically, but also socially and environmentally—in our daily lives.
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