In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, even seemingly small gestures of human courtesy towards chatbots like ChatGPT come with a price tag. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that users saying " please " and " thank you " to the company's AI models is costing "tens of millions of dollars". While the notion of politeness having a significant financial impact on a tech giant might seem surprising, experts explain that this cost is a consequence of how these powerful AI systems operate on an immense scale. How AI Processes Language (And Politeness) Understanding the cost involves looking into the technical underpinnings of AI chatbots. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT process text by breaking it down into smaller units called tokens . These tokens can be words, parts of words, or even punctuation marks. When a user inputs a prompt, the AI processes each token, requiring computational resources like processing power ...