Id be wary of just hacking away without understanding at least the fundamentals of ML + NLP or you'll find yourself lost pretty quick.
I'm a former SWE turned NLP researcher, so i was recently in your position:)
I really enjoyed the research I did in my undergraduate degree (Physics) and so when my partner suggested I apply to the doctoral training program (it's called a CDT in England) it was sort of a no brainer to shoot my shot - the project sounded interesting and the course was designed for those coming from industry.
tl;dr opportunity came up and I jumped ship from SWE to ML research.
- karpathy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
- https://towardsdatascience.com/beautifully-illustrated-nlp-m...
- https://dzone.com/articles/a-deep-dive-into-the-transformer-...
- https://peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers
- http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/2018/04/03/attention.html
- https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-01-27-the-transforme...
- https://blog.quickchat.ai/post/tokens-entropy-question/
- https://dugas.ch/artificial_curiosity/GPT_architecture.html
- https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
- https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/l...
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf