Gorillas was the first game I "learned" programming on as a kid. Fun times going through the source code without understanding anything and inferring it by my self. Well, sort of. :)
I think it's the feeling that this "superpower machine" is something that we little humans cannot compete with anyway. So we sort of trust it and use it.
It's not about whether you use AI or not. It's a tool. It's about whether you put your own effort into creating the core of your craft or whether you just lazily let AI generate simething for you.
If you give an SLA of lets say 10 seconds to find cheaper inference. I look around different providers that offer flex/batch and try to fulfill in that time.
If I can't then I escalate to a default request.
This means you definitely get a response in 10 seconds (could still be a 5xx or 429 from default), but in those 10 seconds I might find you cheaper inference and drop costs by 50%, then charge 20% of that as FlexInference's cut, effectively giving you a 40% discount.
If I don't find the cheaper inference and have to escalate, then I don't charge at all, so it is free.