It Costs Nothing But Creates Much

Dale Carnegie once wrote that "a smile costs nothing but creates much." It's a charming sentiment, and one that still holds true for human interactions. However, in the realm of artificial intelligence, the economics of kindness work a bit differently. OpenAI recently noted that saying "please" and "thank you" to language models could cost millions of dollars in electricity and time. As we see human and machine interactions increase, contrasts can be significant and not always obvious. Politeness isn't wasted on AI, but it isn't free either.

Including "please" often improves the quality of a response. That's a productive exchange: a few extra tokens for better output, which have a quantifiable footprint. Now, consider "thank you" at the end of a conversation. The model doesn't benefit, there's no memory, no relationship, no reward; it will always respond. It will always use electricity and add heat. Large language models operate by processing each word across billions of connections. That computation draws electricity, not only to run chips, but also industrial-scale cooling systems that remove the waste heat produced by the computation itself. Every prompt, no matter how small, can be measured in kilowatt-hours and HVAC cycles.

The cumulative weight of our digital manners is multiplied across millions of users and billions of interactions, so be polite when it improves the result, sharpens the output, or guides the tone. At the same time, recognize when you're just waving goodbye to an algorithm that doesn't wave back. Machines can't smile; for them, every word is a spark that will create much.