What Is the True Cost of Saying Thank You to AI Platforms? The Real Price Will Astound You
Never before has manners been so costly.
Published April 28 2025, 2:32 p.m. ET
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) services can serve as powerful tools that supplement climate activists' efforts to creatively reach audiences, though there are many unique downsides. In fact, AI technology in general surprisingly requires a tremendous amount of water to keep various servers from overheating, and the planetary impact of AI is extremely troubling.
Did you know that some services, tasks, and prompts require an astounding amount of energy to be recruited to power AI models?
We are no doubt a society that values manners, though they may not always be practiced. What is the cost to thank your AI companion for its services?
If you never knew that even a simple "thank you" response to your preferred AI platform's support is costly, you'll want to sit down, buckle in, and reevaluate your reliance on AI.
The cost of saying thank you to AI is enormous.
On April 15, X user @tomieinlove pondered the cost of well-mannered (and well-intentioned) OpenAI users saying "please" and "thank you" to the AI model when prompting and receiving answers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded the next day, saying: "Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know."
Does it really cost OpenAI, or other AI model companies, tens of millions of dollars to generate the power alone to receive respectful inquiries and respond to their users' collective gratitude for the help? Was Altman being facetious? Does this cost represent the total amount for all AI companies, or just OpenAI, and is that cost representative of a full year's worth of operations, or is that the all-time cost to date?
Clearly, given Altman's cryptic answer, many questions abound.
You could hardly be blamed for feeling flustered by now, given just how mysterious AI tech companies can be, operating in the shadows and obfuscating at mostly every turn.
In the most basic sense, according to VICE: "Because ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), even the smallest prompts require the bot to process the information and generate responses. This, of course, consumes energy and costs the company."
Perhaps the fear of a violent robot uprising, as well as being raised to value manners, are reasons why so many AI users nevertheless say "please" and "thank you" with their prompts.
To wi: Entrepreneur reports that "67% of people who use AI in the U.S. are polite to the chatbot. Nearly one out of five respondents of that group (18%) stated that they say 'please' and 'thank you' to AI to protect themselves in case of a possible AI uprising."
The energy consumption for a simple AI search, as opposed to traditional Google searches, is staggering, per an Electric Power Research Institute report.
AI searches "require about ten times the electricity— from 0.3 watt-hours for a traditional Google search to 2.9 watt-hours for a ChatGPT query — to respond to user queries," per the report.
Furthermore, in January 2025, BestBrokers reported that ChatGPT consumes 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours annually just to answer questions. That astounding electricity usage amounts to almost $400,000 a day and $139.7 million a year.
"ChatGPT consumes 100 thousand times more power than a typical household," per BestBrokers. With 300 million users accounting for one billion daily inquiries, these figures will no doubt increase as AI continues to become intertwined in our daily lives.