OpenAI's Surprising Cost: Politeness To ChatGPT Increases Operational Expenses

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that users being polite to ChatGPT is costing the company tens of millions of dollars. Each interaction with ChatGPT involves tokenization, inference, decoding, and server response, with costs varying between models. The environmental impact is significant, with AI expected to represent 19% of data centre power demand by 2028.