> if you could exclude all of the R&D and training costs

LLMs have a short shelf-life. They don't know anything past the day they're trained. It's possible to feed or fine-tune them a bit of updated data but its world knowledge and views are firmly stuck in the past. It's not just news - they'll also trip up on new syntax introduced in the latest version of a programming language.

They could save on R&D but I expect training costs will be recurring regardless of advancements in capability.