OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says users sending “please” and “thank you” messages to ChatGPT is costing the company tens of millions of dollars.

“Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know,” Altman said on April 16 after being asked to estimate the cost on X.

Source: Sam Altman

Altman’s response sparked discussion about what drives users to interact with AI models in a polite manner.

Some AI users say they interact politely with the bots in case AI becomes sentient and starts treating people based on how they interacted with it in the past.

Source: Zvbear

Others, such as engineer Carl Youngblood, claim they’re motivated to treat the AI well for personal development:

“Treating AIs with courtesy is a moral imperative for me. I do it out of self-interest. Callousness in our daily interactions causes our interpersonal skills to atrophy.”

A December 2024 survey by Future found that 67% of American users are polite to AI assistants, with 55% doing so because it’s the right thing to do, and the other 12% doing so out of fear that mistreating the bots could come back to haunt them.

Debate over ChatGPT’s electricity consumption

A September 2023 research paper from Digiconomist founder and Bitcoin mining critic Alex de Vries states that a single ChatGPT query requires around three watt-hours of electricity.

However, data analyst Josh You from AI research institute Epoch AI argues the figure is an overestimate, and is closer to 0.3 watt-hours due to more efficient models and hardware compared to 2023.

One responder to Altman’s post wondered why ChatGPT doesn’t have a solution to save electricity costs on courtesy words like please and thank you.

Altman recently stated that the cost of AI output has been falling tenfold every year as AI models become more efficient.

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Meanwhile, OpenAI expects to more than triple its revenue this year to $12.7 billion, despite an uptick in competition from the likes of China’s DeepSeek and others making rapid progress.

OpenAI does not expect to be cash-flow positive until 2029, when it expects its revenue to top $125 billion.

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Crypto exchange Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou says more than two-thirds of the digital assets stolen from the platform in February by North Korea’s Lazarus Group still remain traceable. 

In an executive summary on hacked Bybit funds posted on X on April 21, Ben Zhou said that of the total $1.4 billion hacked, 68.6% “remains traceable,” 27.6% has “gone dark,” and 3.8% has been frozen.

The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers, then through bridges to peer-to-peer and over-the-counter platforms, he added. 

In February, hackers associated with the Lazarus Group exploited vulnerabilities in Bybit’s cold wallet infrastructure, stealing $1.4 billion in the largest crypto exchange hack to date.

“Recently, we have observed that the mixer mainly used by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] is Wasabi,” Zhou said before stating that following the Wasabi washing of BTC, “a small portion of it entered CryptoMixer, Tornado Cash, and Railgun.”

Zhou confirmed that 944 Bitcoin (BTC) worth around $90 million went through the Wasabi mixer. Multiple crosschain and swap services were carried out through platforms such as THORChain, eXch, Lombard, LI.FI, Stargate and SunSwap before the loot eventually entered P2P and OTC services, he added. 

Another 432,748 Ether (ETH), around 84% of the total worth roughly $1.21 billion, has been transferred from Ethereum to Bitcoin via THORChain. Around two-thirds of that — around $960 million worth of Ether — has been converted into 10,003 BTC across 35,772 wallets, he added. 

Around $17 million worth of Ether remains on the Ethereum blockchain across 12,490 wallets, Zhou reported. 

Around $1.2 billion worth of stolen crypto is still being tracked. Source: Lazarus Bounty

Bybit pays around $2.3 million in bounties

Zhou also revealed that only 70 of 5,443 bounty reports received over the past 60 days were valid. 

Bybit launched the Lazarus Bounty program in February, offering a total of $140 million in rewards for information leading to funds being frozen.

To date, it has paid out $2.3 million to 12 bounty hunters. Most of this went to one entity, the Mantle layer-2 platform, whose efforts resulted in $42 million worth of frozen funds. 

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“We welcome more reports, we need more bounty hunters that can decode mixers, as we need a lot of help there down the road,” Zhou said. 

On April 17, the eXch crypto exchange announced it would cease operations on May 1 after reports alleged the firm was used to launder funds from the Bybit hack.

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Synthetix founder Kain Warwick has threatened SNX stakers with “the stick” if they don’t take up a newly launched staking mechanism to help fix the protocol’s ongoing sUSD (SUSD) depeg.

Warwick said in an April 21 post to X that it has now implemented a sUSD staking mechanism to address the depeg, but admitted it is currently “very manual” without a proper user interface. 

However, once the UI goes live, Warwick said, if there isn’t enough momentum, then they may have to “ratchet up the pressure” on the stakers in the sUSD 420 pool.

The sUSD 420 Pool was a new staking mechanism introduced on April 18 by Synthetix that would reward participants with a share of 5 million SNX tokens over 12 months if they locked their sUSD for a year in the pool. 

“This is very solvable and it is SNX stakers responsibility. We tried nothing which didn’t work, now we have tried the carrot and it kind of worked but I’m reserving judgement,” he said.

“I think we all know how much I like the stick so if you think you will get away with not eating the carrot I’ve got some bad news for you.”Source: Kain Warwick

Synthetix sUSD is a crypto-collateralized stablecoin. Users lock up SNX tokens to mint sUSD, making its stability highly dependent on the market value of Synthetix (SNX).

Synthetix’s stablecoin has faced several bouts of instability since the start of 2025. On April 18, it tapped $0.68, down almost 31% from its intended 1:1 peg with the US dollar. As of April 21, it’s trading at around $0.77, according to data from CoinGecko.

SNX stakers are the key to fixing depeg

“The collective net worth of SNX stakers is like multiple billions the money to solve this is there we just need to dial in the incentives,” Warwick said.

“We will start slow and iterate but I’m confident we will resolve this and get back to building perps on L1.”

A Synthetix spokesperson told Cointelegraph on April 18 that sUSD’s short-term volatility was driven by “structural shifts” after the SIP-420 launch, a proposal that shifts debt risk from stakers to the protocol itself. 

Other stablecoins have depegged in the past and recovered. Circles USDC (USDC) depegged in March 2023 due to the stablecoin issuer announcing $3.3 billion of its reserves were tied up with the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank.

Related: How and why do stablecoins depeg?

In recent times, Justin Sun-linked stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) fell below its $1 peg in January after reports that holders were cashing out hundreds of millions worth of TUSD in exchange for competitor stablecoin Tether (USDT).

Stablecoin market capitalization has grown since mid-2023, surpassing $200 billion in early 2025, with total stablecoin volumes reaching $27.6 trillion, surpassing the combined volumes of Visa and Mastercard by 7.7%. 

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