🙏🤷🏼♀️ Courtesy costs money! According to Sam Altman
Be kind to a bot... or to your wallet?
In a turn worthy of Black Mirror 🪞 with touches of comedy 🎭, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, revealed that educated users 🧑🎓 are shaking up the finances 💰 of the company 🏢.
Yes, you read that right 👀: every "please" 🙏 and "thank you" 🙇♂️ you write to ChatGPT costs millions of dollars 💸.
Altman dropped it just like that, no anesthesia 🥶:
"Tens of millions of dollars well spent... you never know," he replied on X 🐦 on April 16 📆, when asked how much digital courtesy actually costs 🤝.
Why all the fuss about kindness?
It turns out those extra words ✍️, although small 🪶, make the models process more tokens 🧩, that is, more text 📜, more computing 🖥️, more energy expenditure ⚡... and more $$$ 💸.
And of course, AI has no feelings 💔 (yet? 🤖), but we do ❤️.
According to a survey 📊 from December 2024 by Future:
✅️67% of American users 🇺🇸 are educated with AI assistants 🤖
✅️55% do it because they believe it's the right thing ☑️
✅️12% just in case AIs rebel someday ⚠️ (Skynet vibes 🤖☠️)
Others, like engineer Carl Youngblood 🧑💻, see it almost as a spiritual discipline 🧘:
"Treating AIs with courtesy is a moral imperative for me," he said 📢.
A kind of digital yoga 🧘♂️💻, but with "thank you" 🙏.
🌍What about the planet?
This is where things get serious 🧐:
According to Alex de Vries (yes, the same one who criticizes BTC mining ⛏️), a single query to ChatGPT consumes 3 watt-hours 🔋.
But other experts 🧠, like Josh You from Epoch AI, claim that the actual consumption is 10 times lower 📉 (0.3 Wh 🔌).
In any case, the millions of daily interactions 📱 with AI have their energy footprint 🌍.
And if we add courtesies... BOOM! 💥 The electricity bill goes up ⚡📈.
A user even asked 🤔 why ChatGPT doesn't automatically "filter" courtesies 🧼 to save energy.
Altman's response was more existential 🌀 than technical ⚙️.
But don't worry, OpenAI has what it takes...
Despite the spending on good digital education 🎓✨, the company expects to triple its revenue 💼 to $12.7 billion this year 📈, though it won't see positive cash flow 💸 until 2029 (!), when it expects revenues of $125 billion 🏦.
Meanwhile, companies like DeepSeek in China 🇨🇳 are accelerating strongly 🏎️.
The competition is real! ⚔️🚀
📌Sources: X from Sam Altman 🐦, Future 🔮, Epoch AI 🧠, Digiconomist 📊, Cointelegraph 📰, Decrypt 🔓
🤔 What do you think?
Is it worth continuing to say "please" 🙏 to the bots... even if it costs millions? 💸
Or should we be brief ✂️, cold ❄️, and efficient like a smart contract 🧾?
Leave it in the comments! 💬
Follow me for more curious news from the crypto and tech world 🚀, and don't forget to share this post 🔁 if you ever said "thank you" to an AI 🤖❤️.
See you in the cloud! ☁️🤚🏻
