External costs of AI
2025-04-21 18:08:22.747609+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI
“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”
OpenAI spends millions to process polite phrases such as "Thank You" and "Please" with ChatGPT
Sam Altman acknowledges this and reports that ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars just generating responses to these prompts. Taken another way, recent report suggests that even a short three-word "You are welcome" response from an LLM uses up roughly 40-50 milliliters of water.
If only external costs were included in your queries or something...
In the OpenAI community forums user EricGT notes:
If a prompt is not working, then adding “Please” might help. This was much more effective with the earlier ChatGPT and other AI models but less so now, but still something to keep on the list of options.
And then asks for "helpful and with practical objective advise(sic)" which... "if a prompt is not working add 'please'" seems like pretty close to the "it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong" joke.
Anyway, I probably noted back in April that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that 99% of all electricity will be used to power "superintelligent" AI. With that in mind... MeFi: And the Largest Industrial Polluter in Memphis Is... (Drumroll) is a link to MuskWatch: Musk accused of polluting impoverished community with illegal gas turbines
In an April 9 letterto the health department of Shelby County, Tennessee, SELC says that xAI's 35 gas turbines were "all constructed and operating unlawfully without any air permit in Southwest Memphis." According to SELC, the 35 gas turbines emit "between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) per year, making the facility likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis." It is currently producing more nitrogen oxides than the Memphis International Airport (1,077 tons), the Draslovka chemical plant (743 tons), the Valero oil refinery (342 tons).
And Sebastian Deterding @codingconduct@hci.social
LLMs put a trust tax on so many interactions.
Doing uni admissions interviews now and find myself suspecting that some candidates put my questions into an LLM and read off responses, presumably to also help with language issues.
Do we now need to conduct all interviewing in person or just give up?