‘Minnesota Nice’ Is Costing Big Tech Companies Millions Of Dollars

It turns out the politeness associated with Minnesota Nice is costing big tech companies millions of dollars.

You might wonder how the heck that would make sense. No, it isn't because Minnesotans won't buy the last of some tech item on the shelf, though that is a funny thought.

Tech products are not Aunt Mary's famous dessert bars, though. That's not the issue.

How is 'Minnesota Nice' costing tech companies millions of dollars?

The area where politeness, like you see with Minnesota Nice, is costing companies millions of dollars is in the world of artificial intelligence.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company that operates ChatGPT), recently admitted that politeness is costing his company alone millions of dollars.

READ MORE: 'Inconsiderate' Act People Inexplicably Do In Minnesota's Outdoor Spaces

Altman chimed in on a social media thread about people who use phrases like "please" and "thank you" when interacting with AI. The original post wondered how much using pleasant (but unnecessary) phrases like that is costing AI companies.

Altman responded, "Tens of millions of dollars" in the thread. While that's a lot of that money some might argue is "wasted", he continued his comment by calling it "dollars well spent" before completing the comment by saying "you never know".

I'll get into why it might be dollars well spent in a moment.

Regardless of whether it is money well spent or not, the same is true for other companies like Google and their Gemini product, and others.

How are "please" and "thank you" so expensive?

In human-to-human interaction, pleasantries, courtesy, and gratitude are pretty important - and they don't cost anything but a bit of breath and a couple of seconds of time. All well worth it, right?

We all learned that as kids. Especially us here in Minnesota, we have that drilled into our heads from a young age by our parents, "please, and thank you".

But when it comes to interacting with AI, each word - heck, each character in a prompt or response has real costs.

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AI computers use a lot of electricity (and, in turn, money) to receive each response and respond to it. That means that seemingly unnecessary pleasantries like please and thank you could be thought of as wasteful extra words by some.

But are they really wasteful? That depends.

Are these words wasteful?

When you look at it purely from the perspective ot the energy consumed or the dollars spent, it would be easy to say these pleasantries are indeed wasteful.

Altman's response, though, suggests it might not be as wasteful from a different perspective.

Just like with person-to-person interactions, politeness is a learned trait. As the tech website Futurism explains, it is important for AI to learn this lesson, too.

In their article on the subject, they quoted a Microsoft engineer, who explains that proper etiquette "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs". The idea is that when you input polite (or socially acceptable) prompts, those are the type of responses you get.

Just like your parents taught you about interactions with people when you were young.

I'm guilty ot being polite with AI. Partially, because of my 'Minnesota Nice' roots, but also maybe because I don't want to be on the robots' naughty list for being a rude jerk.