Don't thank ChatGPT — OpenAI spends «tens of millions of dollars» on your courtesy

It turns out that your polite communication with ChatGPT is costing the company that developed it a lot.

As the website TechRadar, the user @tomiinlove asked on X: «I wonder how much money OpenAI spent on electricity because people say “please” and “thank you” to the chatbot?» and got a pretty quick answer from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — «tens of millions of dollars».

tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025

Obviously, ChatGPT, which has huge servers that manage all AI operations, incurs high energy costs, and the words «thank you» or «please» account for only a small part of them. Although Altman’s figure sounds quite serious, who knows if it is not a joke? However, don’t rush to say goodbye to politeness to save money for OpenAI — some reports also show that «polite and well-structured prompts» often lead to better answers.

Interestingly, a recent survey by Future showed that more than 70% of the 1000 respondents try to communicate politely with artificial intelligenceand 12% do so because they are afraid of a robot uprising 🙂

As a reminder, today OpenAI has released o3 and o4-mini, which are the first AI models that «think with pictures», and the day before — special AI models for IT professionals GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano. In the coming weeks, we also expect the release of o3-pro — a version of o3 that uses more computing resources to generate answers exclusively for of ChatGPT Pro subscribers.