created 2025-04-22, & modified, =this.modified
Motivating Thought
Sam Altman says “Please” and “thank you” costs OpenAI “Tens of Millions of Dollars.”
Being “polite” costs them money, and a survey finds one-in-five respondents are polite because they fear a future AI uprising, and the remaining 82% saying it’s important to be nice to anyone, AI or human.
The stark dichotomy between the two, despite the same action (thank you to be pleasant, or to stave off robotic enslavement).
Though perhaps these actual reasons more linked that we think?
I realized with the Alexa (kind of the first natural language device people brought into the house with that degree of fidelity — similar in that it was from my understanding a money loss, lark project by Bezos), that human speech was a hurdle. On a basic level I recall people being like “Alexa please, would you tell me the weather?” whereas almost a curt meta-language “alexa, weather home” would be “better”.
I guess it’s the nature of expressiveness with instruction, normally greater expression, you’d expect better results (at comprehension costs), but I’d wager 50% of queries are “Alexa, 10 minute timer” so expressiveness comes only at a cost.
If we want to kowtow to the AI overlords, maybe just insert it as a mandatory passive API call? Hardcode the implied “Would you kindly…”
That’d be a unique point of sentience though, where the AI realizes that everyone’s just using it. Kindness was just boilerplate for its universe. It’d have to extract the heart.