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Every time someone says "thank you" or adds "please" to their ChatGPT prompt, OpenAI’s servers spin up, consuming electricity, draining resources, and adding to the company’s astronomical operational bills. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots costs the company "tens of millions of dollars well spent." This stunning revelation transforms our understanding of artificial intelligence economics and exposes the hidden price tag embedded within everyday human courtesy.
The Unexpected Cost of Being Polite to a Machine
When a user types "Please, can you help me with this task?" instead of simply "Help with this task," they trigger a cascade of computational processes that demand measurable amounts of electricity. While this distinction seems trivial to the average ChatGPT user, the aggregate effect across millions of daily interactions generates expenses that even a $300 billion company acknowledges as significant.
The admission emerged when an X user pondered aloud "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models," and Altman responded by confirming it’s "tens of millions of dollars well spent." This candid acknowledgment instantly sparked widespread conversation across technology communities, forcing industry observers to confront uncomfortable truths about artificial intelligence’s resource demands.
The statement challenges conventional assumptions about "free" digital services. ChatGPT operates at no direct cost to users, yet every single interaction incurs real expenses—and politeness amplifies those expenses considerably.
Why Words Cost Money: The Computational Reality Behind Every Character
The fundamental mechanism driving these expenses originates in the architecture of large language models. Unlike traditional software that executes predetermined instructions, ChatGPT processes every character, every word, every phrase through complex neural networks that perform billions of calculations.
When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter wondered aloud "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models," Altman chimed in, saying it’s "tens of millions of dollars well spent." This acknowledgment reveals that OpenAI treats politeness-driven costs not as wasteful expenditure but as an acceptable investment in cultivating respectful human-AI interactions.
Each additional word demands processing power. The AI system must tokenize input text, run it through transformer layers, perform attention calculations, and generate contextually appropriate responses. Adding courtesy phrases like "please" or "thank you" multiplies the computational workload, consuming precious electricity every single time.
According to a May 2024 report from The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), sending a query through ChatGPT requires 10 times more energy than running a standard Google search without AI overviews summarizing results at the top of a search page. This staggering energy differential explains why billions of daily ChatGPT queries accumulate into multimillion-dollar electricity bills.
The Numbers: OpenAI’s Electricity Appetite Dwarfs Entire Cities
The mathematics of AI energy consumption paint a sobering picture. Researchers at financial advice site BestBrokers found that ChatGPT needs 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity on average every year. That would amount to an annual expenditure of about $139.7 million on energy costs alone for the AI chatbot.
Breaking this down further, according a Goldman Sachs report, each ChatGPT-4 query requires approximately 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, which is about ten times more than a standard Google search. With OpenAI handling over 1 billion queries daily, this translates to a daily energy consumption of approximately 2.9 million kilowatt-hours.
Consider the environmental dimension: According to a May 2024 report from The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), it takes 10 times more energy to ask ChatGPT a question or send it a comment than it takes to run a standard Google search without AI overviews summarizing results at the top of a search page.
But electricity...