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OpenAI constitutes new board after Altman’s return

A simple question posed on X (formerly Twitter) has sparked a curious debate about digital etiquette — and its potential cost. One user asked, “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in with a characteristically dry reply: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.” While Altman’s response was clearly tongue-in-cheek, it opened up a broader conversation: does politeness to artificial intelligence come with a price tag? Technology site Futurism picked up the exchange, musing on whether pleasantries like “please” and “thank you” — often directed at ChatGPT and other AI tools — might be not only unnecessary but also wasteful in terms of time and computing power. But not everyone sees it as a pointless gesture. Kurt Beavers, a design director on the Microsoft Copilot team, suggested there’s more to digital politeness than meets the eye. According to Beavers, polite inputs from users can influence tone and outcomes. “Using polite language sets a tone for the response,” he said. “When an AI model clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back.” In other words, AI might be mirroring more than just words — it could be taking cues from human manners, too. Still, while some users embrace courteous phrasing as part of interacting with AI in a more “human” way, others argue it’s just another habit formed in a world of voice assistants and automated replies — or perhaps even a subconscious hedge against a sci-fi-style future where machines remember how we treated them.

OpenAI has constituted a new board after the return of ex-CEO, Sam Altman as the CEO of the AI startup.

Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president Larry Summers, and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo make up the new board. D’Angelo was formerly a member of the OpenAI board of directors.

The chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, are the three directors who are no longer on the board.

The sudden change in leadership at OpenAI follows Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s announcement on November 19 that the company had hired Altman and Greg Brockman who resigned from OpenAI after Altman was fired to head a new AI research team at Microsoft.

The agreement for Altman to return as OpenAI’s chief executive officer also comes after nearly every employee of the company signed a letter threatening to leave and join Microsoft unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman and Brockman.

Microsoft is a significant investor in OpenAI. The company has been a backer of the company since its emergence.

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