OpenAI Spends Millions of Dollars on ChatGPT Polite Responses

OpenAI spends tens of millions of dollars each year to enable polite responses in ChatGPT, such as “thank you” and “please.”

Although it is known that AI does not experience emotions, many users instinctively thank ChatGPT as if they were talking to a real person, but as Altman notes, even short responses like “you’re welcome” require significant computing resources. As Tom’s Hardware writes, one such response “costs” 40-50 milliliters of water and energy costs for data centers. OpenAI could pre-program template responses to polite remarks, but this is difficult to implement technically. Therefore, the company prefers to keep the dialogue natural, even if this increases costs. At the same time, some users get so used to ChatGPT that they begin to perceive it as an interlocutor, which, according to researchers from OpenAI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), can even lead to emotional dependence.

In addition, users who pay for access to AI are already effectively including the cost of polite responses in their expenses. In the future, experts say, the blurring of the line between human and machine communication may make the habit of being polite to AI relevant.