OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the system costs money to process each time a user says thank you to ChatGPT.
On April 16, @tomiinlove wrote on X: "I wonder how much electricity OpenAI loses when users say please or thank you." The question quickly attracted more than 5 million views and hundreds of thousands of interactions.
Sam Altman later replied: "Tens of millions of dollars," but said it was worth it.
Altman's response shows that OpenAI and many other AI companies are spending a lot of money when users use phrases like "please" and "thank you" to interact with chatbots. According to a survey by Future, 70% of users are polite when communicating with artificial intelligence, even though the systems are emotionless and increase electricity costs.
TechRadar editor Becca Caddy stopped thanking ChatGPT, but found that being polite could improve the quality of responses. She questioned whether being polite to AI would be worth the trade-off in terms of environmental impact.
Dev.ua asked ChatGPT if it would accept thanks from users if the cost of processing was tens of millions of dollars. ChatGPT says: "No, I don't expect that. You have every right to use me in the appropriate way: short, quick, no 'please' and 'thank you'. This doesn't affect my work, I'm not offended, I'm not tired, and I don't need politeness to respond qualitatively."
Previously, some studies have shown that creating a 100-word email using ChatGPT with the GPT-4 model requires a bottle of water or 0.14 kWh of electricity, equivalent to powering 14 LED bulbs for an hour.