Sam Altman: Saying 'please', 'thank you' to ChatGPT is costing OpenAI 'tens of millions of dollars'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on April 11 that ChatGPT had close to 800 million users.

If you're used to saying "please" and "thank you" to AI chatbots, know that OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently acknowledged that using these polite phrases with ChatGPT is costing OpenAI "tens millions of dollars," but he added that it was money well spent.

Responding to a question on X where a user wondered "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," Altman replied that it’s "tens of millions of dollars well spent."

"You never know," he added.

Though it might seem unnecessary to show manners to a chatbot, some experts in AI design believe it actually matters. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers told Futurism that good etiquette "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."

"Using polite language sets a tone for the response," he said. And there’s some logic to it—AI, at its core, can be seen less as conscious intelligence and more as advanced predictive systems, similar to your phone’s autocomplete, but capable of full responses to questions or commands.

"When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a memo from Microsoft WorkLab noted. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."

A survey conducted in 2024 found that 67 percent of American users said they were polite to their AI assistants. Among those, 55 percent said they did it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent admitted it was to stay on good terms in case of an AI uprising.

Number of ChatGPT users inches closer to 1 billion

While the OpenAI CEO has not publicly declared the number of ChatGPT users, speaking to TED curator Chris Anderson on April 11, he said that the numbers very growing very rapidly.

“I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives, and it is growing very rapidly,” he told Anderson before pegging the number closer to 800 million users, referring to it broadly as hundreds of millions of users. “Something like 10 percent of the world uses our systems, now a lot,” Forbes quoted the 39-year-old as saying.

ChatGPT’s user base has been growing at an exponential rate with the release of several products that have gone viral, including its introduction of a new feature that generates images and videos in various styles, including that of the legendary Japanese studio, Studio Ghibli, which created film classics like My Neighbor Totoro. On March 31, Altman shared on X that ChatGPT had added a million users in just one hour, thanks to Ghibli mode.