I am an experienced software engineer with decent knowledge of Python. I've used Machine Learning Models in the past to do stuff like background blurring etc.
What do I want?
I want to be able to train models and use them for the applications I intend to build. I honestly do not care about the Math, statistics or theory behind them. I just want to know enough to be able to train a model, use a model and productionize it. Most of the resources I have seen on the web are bloated with information that I consider irrelevant and don't care about. Are there any resources where I can simply learn to do these things?
In particular, you'll probably want to skip to nanoGPT (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT) and then maybe if you are interested in a bit more of the theory, Zero to Hero (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html), and his comments in one of the threads linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414716
Fine tuning may also be a faster and better place to start, this is a good guide for fine tuning some publicly released LLMs: https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models