Date:
April 21, 2025
Your friendly chats with ChatGPT are adding up—politeness is driving operational costs into the tens of millions, says Sam Altman.
Saying "please" and "thank you" might be good manners, but when you’re chatting with an AI? It’s apparently expensive.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently confirmed what sounds like a digital-age paradox: politeness is pricey. The flood of friendly exchanges with ChatGPT—those harmless-seeming “thanks” and “pleases”—is adding up to tens of millions of dollars in extra operating costs for the company.
Altman dropped the insight casually on X (formerly Twitter), replying to a user who asked about the impact of users’ courteous phrasing. His response? “Tens of millions of dollars,” followed by a shrug of sorts: “But well spent—you never know.”
Why Does Saying “thanks” Cost Money?
It comes down to how large language models work. Every word you type is processed as a token—essentially a chunk of data. More tokens mean more computing power, more server time, and, yes, more electricity. Multiply that by the hundreds of millions using ChatGPT, and even a few extra words per prompt start to bite.
“We don't usually think of kindness as costly,” said one AI researcher on X, “but here, it’s literally generating server bills.”
Still, it’s not all wasted effort. Some researchers argue that the habit of being polite, even with AI, actually helps shape better interactions. Kurtis Beavers, a design manager at Microsoft, told Futurism that courteous prompts “helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs,” suggesting users are also setting the tone for what they want to get back.
So yes, your digital manners might be burning OpenAI’s cash—but they might also be good insurance.
