Me Asking Insanely Stupid Questions To ChatGPT May Have Just Cost OpenAI $1 — And It Highlights A Real Problem

If you are like me, spending tons of time on OpenAI's chatGPT, asking questions that may or may not always make sense, then read on.

What Happened: ChatGPT was a hugely trendy topic in technology around the holiday season in December 2022. It impressed netizens because of its natural and engaging conversation abilities. One can surmise the popularity of the chatbot because it had more than one million users in just the first week of its launch. So, we thought we might as well ask the chatbot a few questions.

Given that chatGPT is free, OpenAI is spending significant resources and money to keep it up and running.

A Twitter user, Tom Goldstein, also the Perotto Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, said that chatGPT usually gives answers in not less than 30 words — which costs OpenAI at least 1 cent per answer.

According to Goldstein, OpenAI is currently spending $100K a day or $3 million monthly.

So what would this cost to host? On Azure cloud, each A100 card costs about $3 an hour. That's $0.0003 per word generated.

But it generates a lot of words! The model usually responds to my queries with ~30 words, which adds up to about 1 cent per query.
— Tom Goldstein (@tomgoldsteincs) December 6, 2022

While chatGPT is designed to be able to generate responses to user input and can have sophisticated conversations, it is not immune to being asked nonsensical questions. While that may seem like harmless fun, it has actual costs associated with it. And when many people ask chatGPT silly questions, it could lead to a significant drain of resources.

To test this, we asked chatGPT about 100 questions, including some insanely silly ones as well, which may have cost OpenAI $1.

Here are a few examples:

Should I dip my French fries in a milkshake before eating it?