The question of the impact of user politeness when communicating with artificial intelligence has sparked widespread discussion on social media platform X (formerly Twitter). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reported that the costs of processing polite requests amount to “tens of millions of dollars, spent not in vain.” This has drawn attention to how the form of address can influence the effectiveness of AI models and the consumption of computational resources.
This is reported by Business • Media
The impact of politeness on AI performance
According to Kurt Beavers from Microsoft Copilot, polite requests to ChatGPT and other AI assistants are “not just a cultural habit, but truly set the tone for the dialogue.” He notes that polite requests make the responses of the models more friendly and relevant. At the same time, the models are capable of understanding more coarse language, raising the question of whether additional resources should be spent to ensure politeness in communication with artificial intelligence.
Criticism of OpenAI’s new o3 model
The release of the o3 model has elicited mixed reactions due to the results of independent tests, which indicated a significant decrease in its effectiveness. According to the company’s presentation in December 2024, the model successfully solved over 25% of tasks from the FrontierMath set, significantly outperforming competitors. However, a study by the Epoch AI institute conducted in April showed that the actual figure is around 10%. This discrepancy is explained by the fact that internal versions of o3 were tested with more computational resources and on different task sets. Meanwhile, the public version of the model was simplified and adapted for practical use, as confirmed by the ARC Prize Foundation.
OpenAI confirmed that the final version is focused on speed and efficiency in real-world scenarios, which affected the performance metrics in laboratory conditions.
“The model is designed for fast operation and use in real conditions, so its characteristics differ from laboratory tests,” the company stated.
It is worth noting that there were earlier reports about OpenAI creating a social network similar to X.