alt Hacker News> they are and they will be
Calculate the approximate cost of raising a human from birth to having the knowledge and skills to do X, along with maintenance required to continue doing X. Multiply by a reasonable scaling factor in comparison to one of today's best LLMs (ie how many humans and how much time to do Xn, vs the LLM).
Calculate the cost of hardware (from raw elements), training and maintenance for said LLM (if you want to include the cost of research+software then you'll have to also include the costs of raising those who taught, mentored, etc the human as well). Consider that the human usually specializes, while the LLM touches everything. I think you'll find even a roughly approximate answer very enlightening if you're honest in your calculations.
But companies don't have to bear the cost of raising a human from birth, or training them. They only pay the cost of hiring them, and that includes cost of maintenence.
Add to that the fact that we can't blindly trust LLM output just yet, so we need a mearbag to review it.
LLM will always be more expensive than human +LLM, until we're at a stage where we can remove the human from the loop