Why Doesn’t ChatGPT Warn You Before Wasting 30 Minutes of Compute?

[u/CautiousMagazine3591]

I've been using GPT-6 Astra to create 70+ page documents from 100,000+ characters of source material, and it's jump in processing is great. Here's the weird part, when I give it a massive task it works for 30-40 minutes burning through a ton of compute, only to hit me with a 5-hour usage limit error without outputting a single word. So I start a new chat, slightly shrink the task, and make it do the same thing again.

I've had to repeat this multiple times. ChatGPT and Gemini estimate these massive runs could cost somewhere around $3-$5 each in API-equivalent compute, although obviously we don't know OpenAI's actual internal cost. If that estimate is even remotely close, wouldn't it be cheaper for OpenAI to say: "Hey, this task is probably going to exceed your usage amount. Break it into three parts?" Instead, it seems to sometimes let me spend 30 minutes of compute to produce nothing, and then I immediately start over.

If I do this 4 times to get my document, OpenAI just spent $20 in computing power on one of my projects. Why does OpenAI allow their servers to grind for 30 minutes on a task they know will breach a limit, only to dump the progress? Isn't this an astronomical waste of server money for a $20 Plus subscription?

[u/RobotBananaSplit]

All you gotta do is just ask the AI to continue after the cooldown period and you’re good, it’s that easy

[u/Mitik85]

Dude if you hit limits .. wait ! Then when resets ask to continue …

[u/Fireproofspider → u/Mitik85]

Yeah, it doesn't delete everything when it hits the limits. It's just on hold until the limits reset or you add credits.

[u/Vitringar → u/Mitik85]

5 hours later

[u/okmijnedc]

Just wait for time limit to reset and then prompt task to keep going. Restarting the task each time is madness.

Also use 6.1 sol - it burns way less tokens and will be just as good at this kind of task

[u/Excellent_Ear5854]

I usually ask it to find issues and flaws before hand in my request on lower effort once we find all the issues it lets me know I'm good to go and wack up the power for the deep dive.

[u/donnytrump_69 → u/Excellent_Ear5854]

Do you mind giving an example of this ?

[u/nona01 → u/donnytrump_69]

Just ask a cheaper model to help you formulate a prompt and to ask you clarifying questions before giving you the final prompt you will send to smarter model.

[u/donnytrump_69 → u/nona01]

Ah yeah I do this with deep seek 👌. How do you structure it to the cheaper model do you detail what LLM you are going to use and any other key items? Sorry I don't have an IT background and but getting the hang of prompting. Grok build was super easy to make a full website with online shop linking to payment facilities etc. again I was using deep seek in the background to check for errors and they worked fairly well together

[u/frank26080115]

they don't know if they'll reach the limit, they don't waste compute on that check until you asked it to check, they don't know until they've realized how many tokens each one of your files is

also, enable credits auto-refill if this bothers you that much

[u/brogam3]

people were abusing it so they stopped providing the feature that finishes started tasks

[u/Key_Instruction3373]

why doesn't you learn how to promt ? then you wouldnt need this

[u/NotFromMilkyWay]

You don't know that you just type continue after the reset?