With the pace of technology progress and the amount of new developments in computer science, it's quite easy today to remain on shallow knowledge, which could s

With the pace of technology progress and the amount of new developments in computer science, it's quite easy today to remain on shallow knowledge, which could still be ok, accepted and further help progress itself. At the end of the day, one of the key point of the progress is to make difficult things easier for a larger audience. This introduces abstraction layers, one on the other. Hence you may not know how the KV Cache works in Attention mechanism, but you might still be able to train a super useful AI model. However I think those unique engineers with vertical and deep knowledge in a tech stack (e.g. C, Java, Maths under NN) are still very needed in the world, because they are capable of building and repairing the fundamentals of everything which gets built upon. So, if you are interested a such fundamental stack, hack it, crash it, it won't be wasted time and world will need you :)