> Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers

OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.

But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.

I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.

It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.