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 fr

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.