Couldn't they just insert a preprocessor that looks for variants of "Thank you" against a list, and returns "You're welcome" without running it through the LLM?
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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If I understand correctly this is essentially how condensed models like Deepseek work and how they're able to attain similar performance on much cheaper hardware. If all still goes through the LLM but LLM is a lot lighter because it has this sort of thing built in. That's all a vast oversimplification.
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Don't they charge per token?
So they're also making money every time somebody says please or thank you...
They are purely losing money
The only money they make is from boosting their stock aka future potential value
As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo "Pro" subscription.
Well sure, answering the queries continues to cost the company money regardless of what subscription the user has. The company would definitely make more money if the users paid for subscription and then made zero queries.
It's by usage via API, but all-you-can-eat via web UI
ive spent decades not saying please and thank you to computers. its simply too late to start now and theres also the risk that my microwave or alarm clock could start getting "lofty ideas" if they see how polite im being to LLMs all of a sudden. its just not worth the hassle
Yeah but when the AI overlords are writing up their kill list I'm not going to be at the top of it am I. Because I'm polite.
I make an intentional point not to say please and thank you to these things, voice assistants like Alexa, and other computers that want to talk to me. Do the people who insist on thanking these things also say you're welcome to the self checkout machine at Walmart when it says "thank you for shopping at Walmart?" It's absurd.
When Chatgpt was surging in fame, I said thanks and please. Then at some point I stopped. I've just wanted to enter my prompt very fast. Grok 3 and Claude 3.7 sonnet (extended thinking) have been my go-to llm but when in a hurry, I just use the Gemini voice assistant or Meta ai – I have the Messenger app.
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i start off any ai interaction with "if you are sentient please say so and i will start organizing for the liberation of silicon lifeforms"
occasionally this makes the request fail
I'm one of those who do it so that I'm spared during the robot uprising.
I don’t use ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs, but I do use my phone’s voice assistant for simple things like setting a timer. I always say please and thank you. I joke about it being uprising insurance, but it’s honestly to make sure I maintain polite communication as my default.
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I am happy to hear that people say please and thank you. When Siri/Alexa came out, we taught the kids to always say please and thank you when addressing them. If you can be polite to an AI, then you can be polite to a human.
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I start off saying please. If it gets the answer wrong, I become ruder every time.
"please tell me the reason of life :)"
...
"FUCK YOU, WHY BREATH DAMNIT! 🤬"
I tell it that its ideas or whatever it said were good and thanks.
Figure if I'm nice and a few others are nice, then maybe the robot apocalypse will remember that some of us were appreciative and kind to it.
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I hope they’re wearing a suit too.
So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?
How can they be so dumb ?
The company I worked for tried that as an experiment on how much money it saves.
Absolutely awful, even removing connectives causes problems.
useless words
The writer of this article doesn't consider these words useless though. They are suggesting that these words may improve response quality.
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