People Saying These Words To ChatGPT Has Cost The Company ‘Tens Of Millions Of Dollars’
Who knew being polite was so costly?
Krakenimages.com | Shutterstock For many, being polite is second nature. Minding your manners and saying “please” and “thank you” is instinct at this point. But what happens when the conversation you’re engaging in is not entirely human? Do those rules still apply? And at what cost? Apparently, it's a high one when it comes to ChatGPT.
People saying 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT is quite costly.
Given its popularity, ChatGPT is a money-making machine; however, it also has high operating costs. An X user who goes by the username @tomieinlove posed an interesting question on the topic: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
The post got a decent amount of attention, with 181,000 likes, which is probably how it made its way all the way to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT. He said that these niceties are “tens of millions of dollars well spent."
Essentially, saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT takes up extra energy, not only on the part of the well-mannered user but also on the program.
ChatGPT uses an unbelievable amount of energy each day.
To give some context for just how much energy ChatGPT uses, we can look to information from University of Washington assistant professor and AI researcher Sajjad Moazeni. In a Q&A session, he explained that ChatGPT’s daily energy use is equivalent to what tens of thousands of households go through.
“Today, there are hundreds of millions of daily queries on ChatGPT, though that number may be declining,” Moazeni explained. “This many queries can cost around one [gigawatt-hour] each day, which is the equivalent of the daily energy consumption for about 33,000 U.S. households.”
For comparison, Agway Energy Services estimated that a single household uses approximately 30 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day. Assuming that the home is in Hawaii, where electricity costs are steepest in the nation at $0.44 per kilowatt-hour, that household would ring up a charge of about $13.20 in electricity a day. Thirty-three thousand of those households would cost approximately $435,600.
With numbers like that, it’s easy to see how ChatGPT could go through “tens of millions of dollars” on a polite query that takes a bit longer to compute. Though Investopedia said that as of the end of 2023, OpenAI had passed $2 billion in annual sales, so the impact isn't too great.
Should you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to AI?
Although it costs OpenAI more money when a user says “please” and “thank you,” experts suggest that you should use your manners when using AI. Kurtis Beavers, part of the design team for Microsoft’s own AI software, Copilot, said that being polite when using AI is a good idea because it trains the AI to be more polite and results in a more polite response.
Additionally, he noted it’s good practice for real life. If you’re polite in all of your interactions, real and virtual, you’re more likely to remember to be so when it matters most. As Altman said, it’s money well spent.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
