This is true. In the current scheme of things, you don't need to know any math to get things going. At some level, if you really need to write a custom model from scratch, probably you need to - but not really.

Now you have the likes of HuggingFace which is another abstraction on top of Pytorch. Heck you don't even need to code a transformer from scratch. They have done it for you.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForMaskedLM tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased") model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")

I was like wow, this level of abstraction is totally breaking barriers to entry and we will see many many flavours of huggingface in the years to come.