SLOUGH, ENGLAND:
If you are amongst those who pepper your liaisons with ChatGPT with a ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, you are advised to cease and desist immediately. Your good manners, whilst looking commendable on paper (or screen) are exacerbating climate change in the same way as, say, leaving the AC on all night. Or taking an hour-long lava-hot shower twice a day for the rest of the year.
At least that is what we are meant to glean from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s exchange on X earlier this week. In response to a query posed by someone who wanted to know how much computing power it takes to compensate for superfluous words of politeness on ChatGPT, Altman did not have an exact amount at his behest, but he did hypothesise that it totalled comfortably up to “tens of millions of dollars”. As a caveat, he added that it may be “money well spent”, because, “you never know”.
Price tag of politeness
Before those of us with an active imagination fully immerse ourselves into picturing the dystopian robot future (more on this momentarily) that Altman’s “you never know” hints at, we must concede that whilst his figure “tens of millions of dollars” does not quite ring with preciseness, it does have an air of some truth surrounding it. According to a Goldman Sachs report on data centre power consumption, a Google search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity; by contrast, one ChatGPT search uses 2.9 watt-hours.
