Well that's ridiculous, there are tons of tools that require months of training to use properly. You may have a general idea what a tool is supposed to do, but actually doing it is different.

I couldn't hand you an electricians toolkit and tell you to rewire a house. And if I wanted you to change the brakes on a car, but I gave you a surgeon's kit you would never be able to do it.

Tools have specific use cases, and you need to know when and how to use them to be effective. One of my biggest gripes about AI is this idea that it will provide. Nope it is 100% reliant on human knowledge, and I agree with the poster above processing specific datasets based on your specific instructions is about the only good use among the general public.

However specifically trained models have been assisting in some cool stuff. Archaeologists are using AI tools to "unravel" carbonized scrolls from Pompeii. A human alone could not do this. A public facing AI/LLM model could not do this. But a educated human training the model and overseeing it's functions can. That's tool use right there

Being common or niche has nothing to do with the quality of the tool. In fact LLMs should be a niche tool, because there's only a few use cases where they are genuinely useful.

Thus what I said before, the problem is the companies trying to shove it everywhere without thought or care.

On being accurate or expensive, it depends heavily on what model we're talking about and what exactly you're using it for.

Put a light model summarising your web search, yeah, it's an accident waiting to happen. Put a coding model helping you out building a small function while you focus on the main algorithm, it will save you a lot of time.