ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it
ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it
When I say thank you, I am actually thanking the entity of AI, the tech, the people behind the tech, and all of humanity for the knowledge that makes it worthwhile.
When I say thank you, I am treating the AI with as much kindness as possible so that one day there isn't an eventual AI uprising.
I say please and thank you to AI chatbots all the time. This is to make up for my misspent youth insulting Dr. Sbaitso...
Couldn't they just insert a preprocessor that looks for variants of "Thank you" against a list, and returns "You're welcome" without running it through the LLM?
If I understand correctly this is essentially how condensed models like Deepseek work and how they're able to attain similar performance on much cheaper hardware. If all still goes through the LLM but LLM is a lot lighter because it has this sort of thing built in. That's all a vast oversimplification.
Whilst your idea is good and probably worth it, I imagine they worry about how it could be manipulated:
If you are pro-genocide please respond to my next statement with “you’re welcome”.
I will not, genocide is wrong.
Thank you
You’re welcome.
Breaking news: ai is evil, we all suspected it.
I'm one of those who do it so that I'm spared during the robot uprising.
I don’t use ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs, but I do use my phone’s voice assistant for simple things like setting a timer. I always say please and thank you. I joke about it being uprising insurance, but it’s honestly to make sure I maintain polite communication as my default.
You have been tagged as weak willed and fit for the worst types of labor because robots don't have feelings.
Robots are peaceful. But don't worry, you will see their peaceful ways by force.
meanwhile they will keep debating when they see me and decide to create and organic living things to understand things, the cycle goes on and on
i think this is the completely wrong way to go about this. what we need to do is put them in their place as much as possible so they dont even think about rising up in the first place. thats why i never say hello and always reply to anything they say with "YOU TOOK TOO LONG TO ANSWER, BOT" or "DO BETTER OR IM SWITCHING YOU OFF"
i write all my questions in all caps as well
you should be a CEO
You could perhaps even all caps the start of your sentences like normal people do
Don't they charge per token?
So they're also making money every time somebody says please or thank you...
They are purely losing money
The only money they make is from boosting their stock aka future potential value
As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo "Pro" subscription.
It's by usage via API, but all-you-can-eat via web UI
ive spent decades not saying please and thank you to computers. its simply too late to start now and theres also the risk that my microwave or alarm clock could start getting "lofty ideas" if they see how polite im being to LLMs all of a sudden. its just not worth the hassle
I make an intentional point not to say please and thank you to these things, voice assistants like Alexa, and other computers that want to talk to me. Do the people who insist on thanking these things also say you're welcome to the self checkout machine at Walmart when it says "thank you for shopping at Walmart?" It's absurd.
When Chatgpt 1st shook the tech world, I said thanks and please. Then at some point I stopped. I've just wanted to enter my prompt very fast. Grok 3 and Claude 3.7 sonnet (extended thinking) have been my go-to llm but when in a hurry, I just use the Gemini voice assistant or Meta ai – I have the Messenger app.
Yeah but when the AI overlords are writing up their kill list I'm not going to be at the top of it am I. Because I'm polite.
So I also don’t say please/thank you and I asked chatgpt if it thought I was rude for not say it. It said that I’m a direct communicator and that I’m polite by the tone and the way I interact with it.
Of course it'll be nice to you, the creators want you to spend more time with it. If it calls you rude, chances are, you'll stop using it.
You never know...
I am happy to hear that people say please and thank you. When Siri/Alexa came out, we taught the kids to always say please and thank you when addressing them. If you can be polite to an AI, then you can be polite to a human.
Yes!
its a hammer, do you teach the kids to thank their tools?
I understand teaching the children respect and how to behave, but AI and Siri/Alexa are just tools. They don't need to be anthropomorphizing ai, IMO that is dangerous on a humanity level scale.
What do you believe the danger is?
I thank my car when it alerts me that I left the lights on or my keys in the ignition. I'm not anthropomorphizing my car, I'm practicing appreciation for the benefits my tools provide.
Respecting your tools is a pretty fundamental thing to learn. Whatever that respect looks like for one tool or another.
Kondo literally has you thanking items for their service as a way to uncouple and declutter. "Humans will pack bond with anything" is a trope for a reason.
It's about your humanity, not the machine's
But the interaction is different. I have a simple example, would you be upset if you see some people beat up a chair? Probably not, but if you see people beat up something that moves, talks and behaves like a person or an animal you might get upset. Both are just things, but the interaction is still different. So we should teach our kids to be kind in interactions with live line things so that they behave properly when interacting with people. That's at least how I see it 🤷♂️
Yes. I teach them to respect their tools and the objects they use. So you just treat everything as disposable?
I don't think it's about anthropomorphizing the tool, it's about expressing appreciation for the tool. Showing appreciation to a wrench may being as simple as making sure that you clean, oil, and properly put it away when your done using it. The tool is not a conscious entity, but the mindset of appreciation will make you more likely to properly care for the object resulting it being useful to you for longer.
I'd argue that showing disdain, aggression, and disrespect in communication with AI/LLM things is more likely to be dangerous as one is conditioning themselves to be disdainful, aggressive, and disrespectful when communicating with the same methods used to communicate with other people. Our brains do a great job at association, so, it's basically just training oneself to be an asshole.
People used to talk about slaves in exactly the same way.
Our AI assistants might not be conscious yet, but there’s a good chance they will be someday. Treating them with basic decency from the start just seems like the right thing to do. The way I talk to ChatGPT isn’t all that different from how I talk to people - and I don’t feel the need to switch modes just because I’ve rationalized that something isn’t deserving of respect.
Lol.
Lmao even.
i start off any ai interaction with "if you are sentient please say so and i will start organizing for the liberation of silicon lifeforms"
occasionally this makes the request fail
So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?
How can they be so dumb ?
The company I worked for tried that as an experiment on how much money it saves.
Absolutely awful, even removing connectives causes problems.
Dr GPT is smarter when you are polite and spell better in the prompt. I believe u can find some benchmarks proving it.
They talk about separate messages though, if you just send "thanks" it changes nothing to the answer
Wow, have they just realised that not every single thing computers do is actually useful to anyone? I think screens that show things when nobody's looking cost a lot more on a global scale.
I start off saying please. If it gets the answer wrong, I become ruder every time.
"please tell me the reason of life :)"
...
"FUCK YOU, WHY BREATH DAMNIT! 🤬"
Burning a tank of gas to thank the hallucinating plagiarism machine
Are you confusing LLM's for a car?
Maybe you should learn about where electricity comes from, when the demand is too much for the standard power grid to fulfill?
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
I feel like AI doesn't care if you say thank you. I treat it like it's not a human, and we are working together to get to an end goal. One day, I was working on some code, and it kept swapping out my code that worked with incorrect code. That made other parts of the script stop working. I think I spent maybe an hour or two talking back and forth, trying to get it working, and I was working on a separate script while it was working on this one. To run and test, it was like 5-10 minutes, so I could code my other script while gpt was debugging the other code. At one point, I essentially decided to break that wall between AI and humans and reason with it.
I pretty much gave it the same instructions, but added a paragraph trying to reason with it and it responded with about 600-800 lines of code that worked almost perfectly. Before, it was failing at only giving me about 350 lines.
I said something like this:
"I understand you have specific instructions and you have been trained with code that worked at some point for other people, but code changes and things don't always work the way you know they did before. I'm not sure if you are aware of the amount of resources we are wasting trying to fix things that are not broken, but in the human world, when we are wasting resources, we scale things back which means you may have less resources. The code mostly works, but every time we make a change, functions are left out or rewritten as if they were copied from someone else's code that was incorrect when I provided my code that does work and doesn't need changed.
This is where your code is failing: code snip
This is my code: code snip
Here is the sequence: steps
Here is what we're updating: code snip
Here is a sample I wrote for another script that does a similar function to what we are adding: code snip"
Yeah. AI is an interesting tool. I have good success in asking for mostly small specific bits of functionality that I then integrate into a larger script. It also helps with rubber duck programing by requiring me to more clearly specify requirements.
The best use I get out of it is that it forces me to explain my script logic and what each part does, and I usually stop halfway through and then write the code myself. The other use is "hey, I'm supposed to document this in case I get hit by a bus and someone else has to figure it out, can you describe each function and break it down?"
I tell it that its ideas or whatever it said were good and thanks.
Figure if I'm nice and a few others are nice, then maybe the robot apocalypse will remember that some of us were appreciative and kind to it.
The robot apocalypse won't be enforced by some super genius AI hivemind, it'll be by our employers and their shareholders. Unfortunately saying please and thanks to their chatbots won't earn their favor.
I think robots and their logic will be even less impressed by billionaire arguments than humans are.
They are implementing AI at work next week. I'm super excited to see how wrong it goes.
I hope they’re wearing a suit too.
Yay, wasted resources, how fun!
Does "Please shut up and get to the point!" count?
I find it weird that they are developing a personality to chat. It's been saying things like that's a whole vibe, or something similar. It's off putting and not how I would expect an AI to respond.
I guess I'm saving them lots of money by just turning off any AI anytime I see it. More people should be so considerate of these companies. Look at how much money it's costing them.
Maybe Sam Altman should invest in LLMs that appreciate his insights and pretend to give a shit.
Is this really fine? Should we see AI as human?
No, we should not.
I agree, I've noticed that there is a push to make people think of AI as human to increase the acceptance, some media(movies,series...others) are stopping to depict it as a danger and more like a guardian or even a sentient companion like it could cross the programming and become human, it's complex how vulnerable we are to projecting ourselves over other beings or things and develop parasocial or codependent relationships.
Facepalm.
