💸 The Hidden Cost of Being Polite to ChatGPT — What Africa’s AI Builders Can Learn

 

In a surprising twist from Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that users who say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT might be costing the company millions. Yes — politeness, it turns out, isn’t just good manners; it’s expensive.

This revelation, covered by outlets like Vice, Quartz, and the Evening Standard, highlighted something critical for developers and policymakers in Africa’s growing AI ecosystem: every extra word we input into a model consumes resources.

Why Does It Matter?

When users engage with AI models like ChatGPT, each word adds to the computational load. These models process prompts token by token (a "token" being a word or part of a word), and more tokens mean more processing time, more energy use, and ultimately, higher costs.

In Altman’s words, the cost of a longer, polite input “adds up” — especially at scale. While it may seem minor, with millions of users worldwide, those extra tokens become a serious energy and financial consideration.

The Lesson for Africa's AI Innovators

At Pamoja AI, we’re focused on building contextually relevant, efficient AI tools for African needs — whether in education, health, travel, or commerce. Here’s why this matters for us:

1. Efficiency is Key: In a resource-constrained environment, optimizing for performance matters. Lightweight prompts, smaller models, and token efficiency should be at the core of AI development on the continent.

2. Designing for Local Context: African languages often use more words to express politeness or clarity. If we localize AI tools without considering token impact, we risk increasing costs without improving performance.

3. Building With Sustainability in Mind: Whether we’re hosting our own models or relying on APIs, understanding the computational cost of our users’ interactions helps us design more sustainable systems.

4. Rethinking User Education: Maybe we need to teach users that being polite to machines, while socially nice, isn't always computationally kind.

So, Should We Stop Saying "Please"?

Not necessarily. But we should be more conscious of how our AI tools interpret and process language. As Africa builds its own AI products, platforms, and ethical frameworks, we need to balance human-centered design with technical efficiency.

At Pamoja AI, we believe in responsible innovation, and sometimes, that means questioning even the smallest design choices, like how a prompt is phrased.