Polite words such as “please” and “thank you” that users use to accompany requests to ChatGPT cost OpenAI millions of dollars annually due to additional data processing. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, stated this on social network X, Tom’s Hardware reports.
“It’s estimated that polite phrases cost OpenAI about $137,000 daily, or $50 million a year,” Tom’s Hardware writes.
These costs arise from the larger number of tokens (units of text) the model processes. Each token requires computing resources, and polite words add 5-10% of extra tokens to requests.
Altman considers these costs justified because such communication makes interaction with artificial intelligence more human.
“In 2024, Goldman Sachs reported that a single ChatGPT request consumes about 10 times more electricity than a Google search query,” Tom’s Hardware points out.
The bank estimates that a single ChatGPT query consumes about 2.9 Watt-hours compared to 0.3 Watt-hours on Google. Given the 8 billion daily requests to AI in 2024, this creates a significant burden.