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Being polite to your AI assistant could cost millions of dollars.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that showing good manners to a ChatGPT model — such as saying “please” and “thank you” — adds up to millions of dollars in operational expenses.
Altman responded to a user on X (formerly Twitter) who asked how much the company has lost in electricity costs from people being polite to their models.
“Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know,” the CEO wrote.
Sounds like someone saw what operating system Hal did in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and is going to be nice to their AI assistant just in case. Experts have also found that being polite to a chatbot makes the AI more likely to respond to you in kind.
Judging from Altman’s cheeky tone, that “tens of millions” figure likely isn’t a precise number. But any message to ChatGPT, no matter how trivial or inane, requires the AI to initiate a full response in real time, relying on high-powered computing systems and increasing the computational load — thereby using massive amounts of electricity.
AI models rely heavily on energy stored in global data centers — which already accounts for about 2% of the global electricity consumption. According to Goldman Sachs (GS), each ChatGPT-4 query uses about 10 times more electricity than a standard Google (GOOGL) search.
Data from the Washington Post suggests that if one out of every 10 working Americans uses GPT-4 once a week for a year (meaning 52 queries by 17 million people), the power needed would be comparable to the electricity consumed by every household in Washington, D.C. — for 20 days.
Rene Hass, CEO of semiconductor company ARM Holdings (ARM), recently warned that AI could account for a quarter of America’s total power consumption by 2030. That figure currently is 4%.
Polite responses also add to OpenAI’s water bill. AI uses water to cool the servers that generate the data. A study from the University of California, Riverside, said that using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to three bottles of water — and even a three-word response such as “You are welcome” uses about 1.5 ounces of water.