There’s an age-old bromide that it doesn’t cost anything to say “thank you” and “please.”
But for OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, both comments come at a cost. A steep cost.
How much? “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know,” Altman said on social media platform X in response to a user asking what OpenAI has paid in electricity-related costs from people displaying good manners on their artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Common courtesy comes at an eight-figure price for OpenAI because two-thirds of people who use AI in the United States are polite to their chatbot, according to a survey by publisher Future in February. It found 82% of those who say “thank you” and “please” to AI did so because it was “nice” to treat AI and humans politely. The other 18% were friendly in the event of an AI uprising.
They were also setting a tone, too. In a Microsoft blog post, Kurtis Beavers, a design director at the software giant, wrote “using polite language sets a tone for the response” from AI. Cordial interaction, he said, leads to a kind response from AI.
But kindness can be killing in energy costs. The Electric Power Research Institute concluded it takes 10 times more energy to ask ChatGPT a question or send it a comment than it takes to run a standard Google search without AI overviews summarizing results at the top of a search page, based on a May 2024 report.
What is more, financial advice site BestBrokers found ChatGPT requires 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity on average annually, or about $139.7 million in energy costs.
“Electricity used by data centers in the U.S. might triple from 2023 (latest data available) to 2028,” Mark Bernstein, president of Earthshot, said in an email. He added that electricity consumed by data centers in 2023 was equivalent to the amount of power used by 16 million households, or the total number of households in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined.
It isn’t just energy consumption that OpenAI must foot the bill for. Water required to cool servers is a significant investment: ChatGPT requires up to 1,408 milliliters of water, to generate a 100-word email, researchers at University of California, Riverside, found. And it takes 40 to 50 milliliters of water to generate a “You are welcome” response from ChatGPT, they said.
Despite the hefty so-called polite bill, OpenAI can afford to pay. Earlier this month, it raised a record $40 billion at a valuation of $300 billion through investor SoftBank and others.
