Sam Altman says polite ChatGPT users are burning millions of OpenAI dollars

Manners are not ruining the environment: The costs of training and running artificial intelligence model are massive. Even excluding everything but electricity, AI data centers burn through over $100 million a year to process user prompts and model outputs. So, does saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT really cost OpenAI millions? Short answer: probably not.

Some shocking headlines involving the costs of being polite to AI chatbots like ChatGPT have circulated over the past few days. A few examples include:

• Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI – TechCrunch
• Saying 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT costs OpenAI millions, Sam Altman says – Quartz
• Being nice to ChatGPT might be bad for the environment. Here's why – Laptop

The news stems from an offhand comment Sam Altman made on X. It began with a simple question: How much money has OpenAI lost in electricity costs from people saying "please" and "thank you" to its language models?

Altman replied, "Tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know."

That one-liner was enough to send outlets like the New York Post and Futurism down a rabbit hole of speculation, trying to estimate the computing cost of civility. The logic goes like this: every extra word adds tokens to a prompt, and those extra tokens require more computational resources. Given the scale of ChatGPT's user base, these seemingly trivial additions can add up.

tens of millions of dollars well spent--you never know

However, several factors complicate the math behind Altman's comment. First is the actual cost per token. ChatGPT says GPT-3.5 Turbo costs roughly $0.0015 per 1,000 input tokens and $0.002 per 1,000 output tokens.

"Please" and "thank you" typically add between two and four tokens in total. So the cost per use amounts to tiny fractions of a cent – somewhere around $0.0000015 to $0.000002 per exchange.

Based on rough estimates, that amount translates to about $400 a day or $146,000 a year. That's several orders of magnitude lower than "tens of millions."

As for real energy costs, the US Energy Information Administration's Electric Power Research Institute estimates OpenAI's monthly electricity bill at around $12 million, or $140 million a year. That figure includes every interaction – not just polite ones.

So while it's theoretically possible that courteous prompts account for more than $10 million annually, we simply don't have the data to break that down. Only OpenAI's internal metrics can say for sure.

Furthermore, Altman's phrasing wasn't literal. The follow-up – "you never know" – suggests the remark was tongue-in-cheek. It reads more like a wry endorsement of politeness than a real financial estimate.

He likely meant that in an era when courtesy feels increasingly rare, maybe it's worth the negligible cost, whether $400 or $40 million. Sure, bots don't have feelings – but if humanity ends up answering to a superintelligent AI someday, it might just remember who was polite – "you never know."

Image credit: Abaca Press