For specifically understanding transformers, this (w/ maybe GPT-4 by your side to unpack jargon/math) might be able to get you from lay-person to understanding enough to be dangerous pretty quickly: https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2023/llm-reading-list.html
An earlier edition of this book was the textbook for a computational linguistics course I took back in ~2002 (!), it's amazing how much has been added
Thank you so much!
I think this one is a bit out of date....
It looks like it covers the basics pretty well. Any pointers to alternatives?
The "Understanding Deep Learning" book covers more recent models as well: https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/ (free PDF and Jupyter notebooks available)