People should speak politely to one another, and the same goes for conversations with robots. When you chat with ChatGPT, do you type out “please” and “thank you” just to stay polite? Normally, saying please and thank you is a sign of good manners, but it turns out it’s a burden for AI? Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI has spent millions of dollars in recent years because people say please and thank you to ChatGPT. Who would have thought that being polite isn’t a good thing for robots! Today, we’re going to share why saying please and thank you costs OpenAI so much money. If you’re interested, keep watching.
Users saying “please” and “thank you” costs OpenAI millions of dollars? ChatGPT’s own response revealed
Recently, a netizen abroad asked, “I want to know how much OpenAI spends on electricity because people say please and thank you to their models?” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied under the post, “Tens of millions of dollars—you’ll never know.”
tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know
— Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025
Sam’s answer should leave everyone feeling confused. Usually, people say we should be polite when speaking—please, thank you, and sorry are essential. And since we’re asking ChatGPT to do things, we should be polite. So why does saying please and thank you cost OpenAI so much money? Logically, as a large language model, every time ChatGPT reads and generates a response, it consumes computational resources. So adding words like “hello,” “please,” “help,” “me” to our questions doesn’t actually help ChatGPT recognize the content any better.
Although the OpenAI CEO said that saying please and thank you costs them a lot of money, our editor asked ChatGPT, “Does saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT actually cost the company millions of dollars?” ChatGPT replied that the cost of processing please and thank you is extremely, extremely low, and the core of model operating costs isn’t word count but computational complexity.
I wonder how everyone feels about this topic? Some people say that while saying please and thank you to ChatGPT is unnecessary, they’ll keep doing it anyway. Because they’re afraid that if AI ever takes over the world, they’d be the first to be taken away for being rude (just kidding). The editor asked, “So can I keep saying please and thank you to you from now on?” ChatGPT warmly replied, “Of course you can! While these words don’t trigger an ’emotional response’ in me, I know they carry warmth and meaning for you.”
As for whether saying please and thank you really costs ChatGPT that much money, that’s probably left to everyone to figure out on their own. After all, the CEO says it’s expensive, but ChatGPT says it doesn’t matter.
Source: KOCPC Chinese