https://mathstodon.xyz/@empty/115088095028020763

The shortcut is Karpathy's "Let's Build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out" video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

Then there is a good video that dives into LLMs and how they work that is quite approachable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI

From there, flesh out knowledge with his other videos, where he goes both extremely light and extremely deep:

https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos

Anyway, I really like's Karpathy's video because he's very good at explaining LLMs at every level.

Generally, I think the Karpathy tutorials are a good starting point but they're very mathy (despite people telling you you only need high school math to understand llms, a lot of the abstractions and concepts he uses are a bit foreign to programmers).

I found out rebuilding inference of a known model taught me a lot more than passively sitting through the videos and maybe retyping his code. You should try it with something simple, like a model from a few years back!