“Please” and “thank you” from users for ChatGPT cost OpenAI “tens of millions of dollars”

Courtesy to AI costs millions of dollars. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed last week that OpenAI’s electricity bills have become “tens of millions of dollars” higher because people are polite to ChatGPT, UNN reports with reference to Entrepreneur.

DetailsLast week, an X user posted: “I wonder how much money OpenAI lost on electricity bills because people say “please” and “thank you” to their models.” At the time of publication, the post had 5.7 million views.

Altman replied the next day: “Tens of millions of dollars spent are not in vain – you never know for sure.”

A survey published in February by Future found that 67% of people who use AI in the US are polite to the chatbot.

Almost one in five respondents in this group (18%) said they tell AI “please” and “thank you” to protect themselves in the event of a possible AI rebellion. The other 82% said they were polite simply because it was “nice” to be so with anyone, AI or human.

Courtesy to AI, as noted, can have a functional purpose. Microsoft Design Director Curtis Beavers noted in a Microsoft blog post that “using polite language sets the tone for the response” of AI. In other words, when you are polite to AI, it is more likely to respond in kind.

However, this courtesy comes at an energy cost. According to a May 2024 report by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), it takes 10 times more energy to ask ChatGPT a question or send it a comment than it does to run a standard Google search without AI reviews summarizing the results at the top of the search page.

Researchers from the financial consulting site BestBrokers found that ChatGPT needs an average of 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This would amount to about $139.7 million per year in electricity costs alone for the artificial intelligence chatbot.

AI also requires a significant amount of water to cool the servers that power it. A University of California, Riverside study shows that ChatGPT needs up to 1408 ml of water, or about three 16.9-ounce bottles, to create a 100-word email. It takes 40-50 milliliters of water to create a three-word “Please” response from ChatGPT.

At the same time, the publication writes, OpenAI can afford tens of millions of dollars in electricity costs for artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, the startup raised $40 billion at a valuation of $300 billion in the largest private technology deal ever recorded. At the time, OpenAI noted that it had 500 million global weekly users, up from 400 million in February.

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