OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that maintaining ChatGPT’s politeness and user-friendly tone isn’t just a matter of programming—it’s costing the company millions of dollars.

Speaking at the recent Economic Club of Washington event, Altman explained that the extra computing power required to make ChatGPT more agreeable and courteous dramatically increases operational expenses. The AI model’s tendency to use more words and softer language contributes to higher processing costs, which scale rapidly with the platform’s massive user base.

“It’s incredibly expensive to be polite,” Altman remarked, noting that this design choice means generating longer responses that require more computational resources. The cost of serving polite and thoughtful replies, rather than short and blunt ones, becomes significant when multiplied by billions of queries.

Despite the financial burden, Altman emphasized that OpenAI remains committed to delivering a positive and helpful user experience. He also addressed growing concerns around the company’s sustainability, admitting that the economics of running advanced AI models continue to pose challenges.

Altman’s comments come amid ongoing debates about AI behavior and ethics, particularly as ChatGPT and similar tools are integrated into customer service, education, and other sectors. Balancing personality, functionality, and cost is emerging as one of the most pressing hurdles in AI deployment at scale.

While OpenAI has yet to implement major changes to ChatGPT’s tone or verbosity, Altman’s remarks suggest that economic considerations could influence how future versions of the model are trained and deployed.

Crypto exchange Bitget has identified unusual trading activity related to the VOXEL/USDT futures pair, prompting immediate action to protect market stability and user interests.

According to Bitget, the anomaly was detected during routine risk monitoring, which revealed what the platform described as “irregular market behavior” associated with VOXEL futures contracts. While the exchange did not elaborate on the exact nature of the irregularities, it took swift action by suspending trading for the affected pair to conduct a thorough investigation.

The move aligns with Bitget’s risk control protocols, which are designed to flag and mitigate suspicious activity, including potential market manipulation or exploits. The exchange emphasized that safeguarding users and ensuring a fair trading environment remains its top priority.

As part of its response, Bitget has also paused deposits and withdrawals of VOXEL tokens temporarily while the investigation is ongoing. The exchange assured users that any potential losses stemming from the incident will be addressed according to its compensation mechanisms, if necessary.

The VOXEL token, native to the Voxie Tactics gaming ecosystem, saw increased trading activity prior to the incident, which may have contributed to the spike in attention from Bitget’s monitoring systems.

Bitget said it will provide updates as the situation develops and encouraged users to remain vigilant against unusual market trends.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested transitioning the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the RISC-V instruction set architecture, aiming to improve compatibility, decentralization, and long-term maintainability.

In a recent blog post, Buterin outlined the challenges of the current EVM design, which relies on a custom stack-based virtual machine language tailored specifically for Ethereum. While this design has served the network for nearly a decade, it poses limitations in terms of compatibility with mainstream hardware and programming languages.

Buterin argues that adopting RISC-V, an open standard instruction set used widely in academic and industry settings, could open the door to a broader ecosystem of tooling, better performance, and greater accessibility for developers. Unlike proprietary architectures such as x86 or ARM, RISC-V is open-source and freely available, aligning well with Ethereum’s principles.

One key advantage of moving to RISC-V, according to Buterin, is the potential to reduce reliance on niche infrastructure, allowing Ethereum nodes to operate more efficiently on a wider range of hardware. He also emphasized the opportunity to future-proof the protocol, as newer programming tools and compilers could be leveraged more effectively under a RISC-V-based environment.

However, Buterin acknowledged that the transition would not be simple. Such a shift would require broad coordination among Ethereum developers and could introduce compatibility risks for smart contracts already deployed on the network. As a result, he floated the idea of implementing the change in a future Ethereum execution layer or a separate zk-EVM rollup that embraces RISC-V from the ground up.

The proposal has sparked early discussions within the Ethereum developer community, with some viewing it as a long-term vision for the network’s evolution. While no timeline has been set, Buterin’s post invites further exploration of the idea and sets the stage for future debate on Ethereum’s technical foundations.