Politeness is expensive: OpenAI spends millions of dollars on “thank you” and “please” in ChatGPT

OpenAI spends tens of millions of dollars a year processing polite phrases like “please” and “thank you” in ChatGPT. Despite the high costs, CEO Sam Altman believes it’s worth it. He believes that such responses make communication with artificial intelligence more human and friendly.

Image source: AI

OpenAI could pre-program template responses to polite remarks, but this is difficult to implement technically. So the company prefers to keep the dialogue natural, even if it increases costs. At the same time, some users get so used to ChatGPT that they begin to perceive it as a conversational partner, which, according to researchers from OpenAI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), can even lead to emotional dependence.

Interestingly, users who pay for each request with tokens have already formally “included” polite responses in the cost of the service. Experts do not rule out that as AI develops, the boundary between human and machine communication will disappear, and then the habit of being polite with ChatGPT may prove useful. However, for now this is just a theory, and OpenAI’s millions in expenses on pleasantries are quite real.