OpenAI CEO Reveals: Why Polite Words to ChatGPT Cost Millions?

(Patria) - AI models heavily rely on energy stored in global data centers, which already consume about 2 percent of the world's total electricity.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that politeness towards ChatGPT, such as using "please" and "thank you," costs the company millions of dollars in operational expenses.

Altman responded to a user on X who asked how much electricity the company spent due to people being polite to their models. "Tens of millions of dollars well spent - you never know," Altman replied.

It seems someone watched what the HAL operating system did in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and decided to be polite to their AI assistant. Experts have also found that a chatbot is more likely to respond kindly if the user addresses it that way, writes Index.hr.

Judging by Altman's humorous tone, the figure of several tens of millions of dollars is probably not precise. However, every message to ChatGPT, no matter how trivial or meaningless, requires the AI model to generate a full response in real-time, which relies on powerful computer systems, increasing the overall computational load, and thus, mass electricity consumption.

AI as an Energy Consumer of the Future

AI models heavily rely on energy stored in global data centers, which already consume about 2 percent of the world's total electricity. According to Goldman Sachs, each query to the GPT-4 model consumes about ten times more electricity than a standard Google search.