Saying "please" or "thank you" to a chatbot might not seem like a bad thing. However, these simple words of courtesy could well weigh heavily on OpenAI's energy bill. This is what Sam Altman, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, suggested in a reply on the X network (formerly Twitter). When asked by an internet user curious about the cost of these polite gestures for servers, Sam Altman replied, not without irony: "Tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know."
Servers greedy even for polite gestures
A way of downplaying the situation, certainly, but which raises a real question: are we aware of the environmental impact of our interactions with AI? If the volume of requests continues to increase, even the most innocuous messages – like an isolated "thank you" – can accumulate and represent a significant consumption.
According to a survey conducted by Future PLC, 70% of users are polite to AI, and 12% do so in the event of... an uprising from the machines. If we believe the technical data, each response generated by the GPT-4o model would consume an average of 0.3 watt-hours. A figure that may seem minimal, but multiplied With millions of daily queries, it becomes significant.
Should we then ban polite phrases to save the planet? Not necessarily. Being kind with ChatGPT could even improve responses. Users have found that structured and respectful queries often yield better results. Politeness with bots can be an important factor in reliability.
This raises an intriguing hypothesis: could etiquette one day become a variable taken into account in query processing? Will AI models respond differently depending on the user's tone? If so, saying "please" would no longer be polite, but an optimization strategy.
Environmental impact isn't just about electricity. Water also enters the equation. In 2023, a report estimated that each response generated by ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot would be equivalent to the consumption of a bottle of water, used to cool servers. For GPT-4, this figure rises to three bottles per 100 words.
Ultimately, is being polite to an AI a futile gesture or a habit to reevaluate? For OpenAI, the additional cost seems acceptable. "It's money well spent," says Sam Altman. But as artificial intelligence tools become more widespread, these accumulated little phrases take on a very real dimension in the energy equation.
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