Michael Smith
5.3K posts
We need a moratorium on AI data centers NOW. Here’s why.
Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.
@IvanVendrov @gmiller Start by assuming there's a way. Take your ignorance of WHAT that way is as a challenge. Not knowing how to solve a math problem isn't a good reason to let it defeat you. But you can make it one if you want. Popular choice.
@gmiller stop them how? how do you propose we fight trillions of dollars in economic incentives & now the most powerful militaries in the world? if I had a good plan to slow things down I would. for now it seems the best I can do is try to steer well through the singularity
if, in some deep nondual sense, you *can’t* be separate from God, then what is the pain that people keep calling “separate from God”? it's being mislabeled, but it's a real experience what is it an experience *of*?
