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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said users’ politeness to ChatGPT is costing millions due to higher computational load. ChatGPT now has over 150 million weekly active users.
OpenAI has introduced a new Ghibli-style filter for ChatGPT as the company faces several lawsuits.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that users’ politeness to ChatGPT, such as saying “please” and “thank you”, is costing the company millions due to the extra computational load and increased operational expenses.
Altman’s statement about the operational costs came after a user on X (formerly Twitter) innocently wondered about the price of being polite to the artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“How much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models,” wrote the user.
As the post went viral, Altman replied: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent.” He added, “You never know.”
Reacting to Mr Altman’s statement, one of the users said: “I feel this can be solved incredibly easily with client side code answering you’re welcome lol.”
Another added: “If they really wanted to save on electricity, they’d stop having it end every answer with a question.”
ChatGPT’s Significant Spike
ChatGPT has seen a significant spike in users recently, particularly following the viral Ghibli-style AI art trend, with average weekly active users surpassing 150 million for the first time this year.
According to a Goldman Sachs report, each ChatGPT-4 query requires approximately 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, which is about ten times more than a standard Google search. With OpenAI handling over one billion queries daily, this translates to a daily energy consumption of approximately 2.9 million kilowatt-hours.
OpenAI recently launched two new reasoning models to beat the likes of Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek in the cutthroat global AI race. According to OpenAI, o3 achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWE-bench verified — a test measuring coding abilities, scoring 69.1 per cent. Meanwhile, the o4-mini model achieves similar performance, scoring 68.1 per cent.
