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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.”
tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know
– Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025
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.
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
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