Arizona computer science expert explains why being polite to AI can be expensive

PHOENIX – When it comes to artificial intelligence, being polite can be expensive, according to an Arizona computer science expert.

Every response generated by a large language model like ChatGPT uses significant resources to power the complex computations required to complete a task, according to Yezhou “YZ” Yang, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence.

As a result, companies are shelling out huge amounts of money on their chatbots responding to users saying “please” and “thank you.”

“Whichever prompt you type, whether it’s being nice or whether it’s a very sophisticated question you are asking, essentially will be translated into a bunch of vectors … and be fed into this gigantic neural network,” Yang said.

Chatbot models analyze the entirety of a conversation to provide an appropriate response. For example, they use context to determine whether your “thank you” is sarcastic or truly a nice gesture.

The problem made headlines recently after OpenAI founder Sam Altman posted a response to an X user saying his platform spends tens of millions of dollars on electricity costs for such niceties.

tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025

AI data centers becoming big business in Arizona

The issue is particularly noteworthy in Arizona, where a growing number of large data centers that power artificial intelligence technology are prompting concerns about the impact on the state’s water supply and electrical grid.

Still, there are some benefits of being nice aside from trying to protect yourself from some future AI uprising, according to Yang.

For example, the positive feedback can help the language models become more efficient and therefore use less energy in the future.

“Although at the current stage it takes a huge amount of energy, when we further develop and improve with this whole community’s efforts, we can expect the models are going to be more efficient … and this amount of energy cost will reduce naturally,” he explained.

Related

Data centers that power AI have huge impact on Arizona's power grid, water supplyAligned Data Centers breaks ground on West Valley campusArizona regulators look to protect residential ratepayers from high-energy data centersPhoenix mayor says TSMC’s $265 billion investment is historic on multiple levelsTSMC announces additional $100 billion investment in Arizona operationsArizona receives slice of 42-state, $18M settlement over 23andMe genetic data breach