Saying "Thankyou" And "Please" To ChatGPT Costing OpenAI Millions Of Dollars, Says Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that politeness from the users towards ChatGPT is costing his company millions of dollars. Users saying phrases such as "please" and "thank you" at the end of their search queries was putting additional computational strain on the systems, leading to an uptick in operational expenses.

Mr Altman revealed the extent of operational costs 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, Mr Altman replied: "Tens of millions of dollars well spent."

He added: "You never know."

I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their models.

— tomie (@tomieinlove) April 15, 2025

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."

Also Read | ChatGPT's "Creepy" Behaviour Irks Users: "Feels Like Privacy Invasion"

ChatGPT's increased usage

ChatGPT has been witnessing a surge in users in recent weeks, especially after the Ghibli-style AI art trend went viral. Average weekly active users breached the 150 million mark 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.

Earlier this week, OpenAI launched two new reasoning models to beat the likes of Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek in the cutthroat global AI race. As per the Altman-led company, 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.