It doesn't have to, it just has to outperform humans on some tasks. Often really simple tedious tasks. Take this whole discussion out of the context of AI and instead look at it as just a machine. Machines outperform humans at all sorts of things, that's why we built them. Your dishwasher outperforms a human because it can wash your dishes on demand for pennies while a human taking that task from you would demand $15/hr. My car vastly outperforms my legs at getting me places. Email outperforms the USPS for correspondence. I don't know if there's a limit to the side of HN comments but I could hit it if I continued. These LLMs are a new tool that can perform tasks autonomously that couldn't be done before, and that's super cool. For some reason people get swept up in the mystique of it all and expect them to replace a human, body and soul, at every task which is kinda silly when discussing an advanced washing machine.

It doesn’t have to be as performant nor fast. It can work and iterate alone when setup properly. All time spent is purely bonus. It is already inevitable.