# ** Please-Thank You for ChatGPT Costing Millions of Dollars*
OpenAI founder Sam Altman revealed that the words “please” and “thank you,” commonly used to make requests to ChatGPT, cost millions of US dollars.
“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their model,” asked an X user named Tomie.
Altman replied that both words incur a fantastic cost. Nevertheless, he stated that the money spent on artificial intelligence (AI) is well spent.
As information, it requires a lot of energy to generate answers or train generative AI. Training a large language model like GPT-3 from OpenAI alone uses nearly 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, which is the annual consumption of about 130 homes in the United States.
According to the International Energy Agency, one ChatGPT query requires 2.9 watt-hours. This means that if there are 9 billion queries made each day, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours per year, equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 1.5 million residents of the European Union.