OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says users sending "please" and "thank you" messages to ChatGPT is costing the company tens of millions of dollars

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says users sending "please" and "thank you" messages to ChatGPT is costing the company tens of millions of dollars.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that users' messages such as "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT are costing the company tens of millions of dollars annually.

Responding to a user's query on X regarding the estimated cost of users' messages like "please" and "thank you" to process in ChatGPT, Altman estimated it to be "tens of millions of $."

It’s tens of millions of $.

— Sam Altman (@samaltman) April 16, 2024

While some users expressed amusement at the thought, another user pointed out that ChatGPT should ideally have a solution to save electricity costs on courtesy words.

Ya think they'd have a solution for that by now. Save some serious coin on the thank you and please.

— Ben (WnrOnChain) (@WnrOnChain) April 16, 2024

Earlier this year, Altman disclosed that the cost of AI output has been decreasing tenfold annually as models become more efficient.

In December 2024, a survey by Future among 1,000 American adults found that 67% of users were polite to AI assistants, with 55% doing so because it's the right thing to do, and the other 12% doing so out of fear that mistreating the bots could have negative consequences for them.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is projecting more than a triple in revenue this year to $12.7 billion, despite increased competition from Chinese startup DeepSeek and others rapidly closing the gap.

The company anticipates becoming cash-flow positive by 2029, when it forecasts revenue to exceed $125 billion.

As of January, OpenAI's primary product, ChatGPT, had around 218 million active users, while its image generation tool, Stable Diffusion, boasted over 349 million users.