Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, responded to the worries about people being polite to AI by pointing out that this could result in expensive energy costs.
A user on X (formerly Twitter) took to the platform to talk about polite phrases, “please” and “thank you,” costing extra energy for the OpenAI chatbot.
“I wonder how much money Open AI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models,” the user’s post reads.
I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their models.
— tomie (@tomieinlove) April 15, 2025
Altman then answered the user’s query and wrote, “tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know.”
Even though it costs millions to use these terms, some experts in AI design think that being polite and having good manners could really make AI better. In fact, polite encounters “help generate respectful, collaborative outputs,” Kurtis Beavers, design manager at Microsoft, told Futurism.
In a Goldman Sachs Research, the increase in power consumption of AI models is driven by the complexity of computations involved. “The primary driver of this increased power demand is the growing computational intensity of AI workloads, particularly those related to generative AI and large language models,” the research pointed out.
Large volumes of data processing, storage, and calculation are needed for these models, which results in a notable rise in energy usage.
Consequently, it is anticipated that data center power demand will increase significantly, with AI accounting for around 19% of data center power demand by 2028.
With the humorous yet insightful remark, it swiftly gained attention and sparked a larger discussion on the practical costs of communicating with AI models.
Can't believe it costs to be polite in 2025. https://t.co/tPqD3gzncY
— Kevin (@kewarrie) April 20, 2025
Why don't ChatGPT send cache response for these courtesy words like Thank you, Great Work, Wow Amazing, Nice, etc instead of processing data at high cost though the answer is same for selected courtesy words. This is just my opinion. Thank You https://t.co/UR3Esuo5bF
— Quresh Nawaz (@QureshNawaz) April 20, 2025
Couldn’t chat GPT save millions of dollars by automating these types of responses with something emotive for text based prompting?
Would be good for the environment as well https://t.co/HcAzmTPtGX
— Logan2Y (@Logan2Y) April 16, 2025
This. Treat your AIs with respect! They are not tools anymore. They USE tools. Do you see the difference? https://t.co/XaASWsvDkx
— Bughunter Nerd 🌎🌍🌏☮️❤️ (@bughunternerd) April 16, 2025
A small price to pay so we can be saved when the AI-powered bots come to take over, that we might be spared. https://t.co/57X4sOTyPH
— Mark Amaza (@amasonic) April 20, 2025
Good manner cost n̶o̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ millions https://t.co/KoKNH5izFp
— Ian by Design (@ianbydesign) April 20, 2025
Then make custom chips or something, so it won't be so expensive https://t.co/0ENNeZwz9J
— Mr. Palindrome (@brightonwe30) April 17, 2025
Having over a billion queries handled daily, OpenAI’s energy use totals around 2.9 million kilowatt-hours per day.
The disclosure comes as ChatGPT’s popularity has skyrocketed, partly because of trends like Ghibli-style AI painting. Recently, there were more than 150 million weekly active users, the most so far in 2025.
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