The post What politeness teaches ChatGPT — and why OpenAI’s artificial intelligence is paying millions to listen appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Are “please” and “thank you” just good manners, or are they changing how ChatGPT learns, behaves, and costs OpenAI’s artificial intelligence millions each day? Saying “please” might be costing millions It’s something most of us were taught as kids. Say “please.” Say “thank you.” Politeness costs nothing. But with artificial intelligence, that old wisdom may no longer hold true. Being polite to a chatbot might actually come with a price. In a short exchange on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed a curious detail about how AI systems work. When asked how much it costs OpenAI when users include extra words like “please” and “thank you” in their queries to ChatGPT, Altman replied, “Tens of millions of dollars well spent. You never know.” tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know — Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025 Each word we type into ChatGPT is processed through vast data centers, where it gets broken into tokens, run through complex computations, and turned into a response. Even small pleasantries are treated the same way. They require computing power.  That means electricity, cooling systems, and more time spent per request. When multiplied across millions of conversations, those few extra tokens stack up into real energy and infrastructure costs. According to a December 2024 survey by Future, the parent company of TechRadar, 51% of AI users in the U.S. and 45% in the U.K. regularly use AI assistants or chatbots.  Among them, Americans were more likely to be polite. In the U.S., 67% of users said they speak to AI with courtesy. Of those, 82% said it’s because it feels like the right thing to do, regardless of whether the recipient is human or not. The other 18% have a different motivation. They said they stay polite just in case there’s ever…

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Filed under: News - @ April 21, 2025 3:28 pm