SAM ALTMAN ADMITS THAT SAYING "PLEASE" AND "THANK YOU" TO CHATGPT IS WASTING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN COMPUTING POWER.

On April 16, 2025, an X user asked Altman how much OpenAI had spent on electricity because people type things such as “please” and “thank you.” Altman replied: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.” TechCrunch characterized the comment as tongue-in-cheek rather than a documented calculation. A 2026 study examined the energy cost of messages such as “thank you,” using real-world conversation traces and energy measurements. It found that input length, output length, and model size all affect energy consumption. The electricity used by the extra words isn't necessarily the same thing as OpenAI's financial cost. Data centers have fixed infrastructure, GPUs may be processing many requests simultaneously, and electricity is only one component of the cost of operating an AI service. OpenAI itself now says that estimates circulating online about ChatGPT's energy consumption have sometimes been substantially overstated. It cites independent Epoch AI analysis estimating a typical GPT-4o query at around 0.3 watt-hours, while noting that energy consumption varies by model and workload. The wording “well spent — you never know” strongly suggests humor rather than a claim that OpenAI's accountants had isolated exactly how many dollars were spent on polite language. TechCrunch reached essentially the same interpretation. And there's a funny second layer to his comment: humans don't need to stop saying please and thank you to AI. The marginal computational cost is tiny for an individual user, and polite language can sometimes make the interaction clearer or establish the desired tone. #ChatGPT #OpenAI #SamAltman