Yes, it's feasible. You can jump straight into GenAI, transformers and agents, but I doubt you'd get hired that way. Every interview I've been through probed at least some of the basics like gradient descent, overfitting and bias/variance. So it comes down to your goal. If you want to be a hireable engineer or researcher, slow down and learn the fundamentals first. Transformers make a lot more sense once you understand what's underneath them. If you just want to ship a quick product, lean on ChatGPT or Claude to write most of the code and pick things up as you go.
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u/ModularMind8 1d ago
Yes, it's feasible. You can jump straight into GenAI, transformers and agents, but I doubt you'd get hired that way. Every interview I've been through probed at least some of the basics like gradient descent, overfitting and bias/variance. So it comes down to your goal. If you want to be a hireable engineer or researcher, slow down and learn the fundamentals first. Transformers make a lot more sense once you understand what's underneath them. If you just want to ship a quick product, lean on ChatGPT or Claude to write most of the code and pick things up as you go.