And so say ” THANKS “ An artificial intelligence cost millions? Sam Altman, CEO of Openai, reveals that courtesy brands in queries addressed to Chatgpt weigh heavily on operational costs. Behind these harmless human interactions hides an unexpected tension between conviviality and technical performance. This paradox asks capital questions about the design of AI, their daily uses and the economic sustainability of an expanding model.
In short
- Sam Altman reveals that the polite brands addressed to Chatgpt generate significant operational costs for Openai.
- Each additional word in requests increases treatment, increases energy consumption and weighs on the infrastructure.
- Despite these additional costs, Openai chooses to maintain a fluid and natural user experience.
- The company is aimed at rapid growth in its income, but does not envisage profitability for several years.
Digital politeness, a very real load for Openai
During a speaking relayed by Bloomberg, Sam Altman revealed an unexpected consequence of linguistic uses in exchanges with Chatgpt:
People say please and thank you to Chatgpt, which is charming, but it costs us a lot of money.
According to the CEO of Openai, these politely valued politeness formulas, weigh down the processing of requests and cause additional expenses estimated at tens of millions of dollars. He underlines On April 17, 2025 on social network X (ex Twitter) to what extent human behavior, even benevolent, can impact the economic models of technological giants.
Several technical elements explain this situation:
- Each word counts: polished formulations extend the requests and increase the number of tokens treated, which more requires calculation resources.
- Increased energy consumption: although certain estimates report 3 watthers per request, more recent assessments indicate a consumption of approximately 0.3 watt hours thanks to improvements in efficiency. As a comparison, this debate around the energy impact recalls that surrounding Bitcoin, often criticized for its high consumption linked to mining.
- The impacted scalability: with millions of daily interactions, the rehearsal of longer queries amplifies the impact on infrastructure.
- A cumulative effect: this additional cost manifests itself on the entire user ecosystem, from free users to paid customers.
In short, politeness in digital interactions, valued at ethical and human level, represents a concrete challenge in terms of technical performance and budgetary control for actors in the AI sector.
Why so much kindness towards an AI?
Beyond the figures, user motivations to contact an artificial intelligence with respect are multiple, and sometimes unexpected. A survey conducted in December 2024 by the Think Tank Future revealed that 67 % of American users are polite with AI assistants.
Among them, 55 % say it is simply “The right thing to do”while 12 % admit fear of being judged or penalized in the future if the AI was endowed with a form of consciousness or memory.
The engineer, Carl Youngblood, explain Its position on platform X this April 17:
Treating artificial intelligences with courtesy is for me a moral imperative. I do it out of personal interest.
He believes that disrespectful to a machine could rejake on his own human relational skills.
This perception of an ethical link with the machines reveals a substantive trend: users are planning social standards on technologies, as if AI deserved to be treated as a peer. Also, some Internet users explain wanting to “Training” With kindness, even in a digital setting, to maintain a form of civility in their daily lives.
Others, more pragmatic, think that this posture could bring them luck if one day the AI became capable of remembering the past interactions. This projection challenges our relationship to technologies and the illusion of reciprocity that a powerful chatbot can induce.
If, for the moment, Openai does not provide any technical measures to filter or ignore polite words, the question could emerge in the coming months. As AI integrates into daily uses and global demand explodes, the need for energy optimization will become critical. Between humanization of interfaces and cost rationalization, developers may have to decide: does politeness have its place in the requests addressed to a machine? And if so, at what price?
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