To COP31: Your Prompts Are Packing Away an Electric Bill
Back in April of last year someone on X posted how much electricity OpenAI must spend when users add “please” and “thank you” to their ChatGPT prompts. Sam Altman responded with “Tens of millions of dollars well spent” then “you never know” [1].
Sounds like a dad joke. While doing some digging on the environmental impacts of AI, that quote started hitting different. My research led me down rabbit holes and the more I looked the joke stopped being funny because it wasn’t nearly close enough to the truth. “Please” equates to 1 or 2 tokens of the hundreds that could be part of any given prompt.
Where then is all that electricity going? To doing things we do mindlessly. Using the biggest model available just to polish up meeting minutes. Asking for a page long write-up when you really only needed two lines, or rephrasing a vague question over...
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