Manners to ChatGPT costing OpenAI millions
Showing manners to ChatGPT, even saying “please” and “thank you,” is costing OpenAI millions in electricity, its CEO Sam Altman has revealed. This came after a user on X, formerly Twitter, asked about the financial impact that politeness is having towards its operating cost. Altman replied that the loss had been “tens of millions of dollars well spent.”
Chatbots, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini use large language models (LLMS) which rely on a great deal of computing power, being hosted in data centres. They therefore require thousands of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) to run them efficiently. These GPUs are responsible for a large amount of the processing needed to both interpret prompts and generate a response in real time, and needs a great deal of electricity to run.
A single AI-written response, a short email or paragraph, can consume as much as 0.14 kilowatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to around 14 LED bulbs being kept on for an hour. Scale that across billions of interactions every day and that adds up.
And while some would see showing good manners towards AI as being unnecessary, AI experts argue that it helps shape interactions in a good way. Respectful prompts, Kurtis Beavvers, director on the design team for Microsoft CoPilot, has argued that people should show good manners, writing respectful prompts, saying that doing so will “help generate respectful, collaborative outputs.”
The phrasing, Beavers says, will actively influence how it replies, leading to a more constructive and professional conversation.
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