Realistically speaking, how long would it take for someone who has college-level Linear Algebra and multi-variable Calculus knowldge and rusty familiarity with ML (via Andrew NG's matlab course) to learn the concept of LLM and state of the art algorithms behind SDs and GPTs?
Would it even make sense if one's interest is not image or text generation?
A couple of months. Also, there is a world of difference between knowing the topic on a superficial level and training and evaluating a model yourself.
i mean to learn all the details it'd prob take the equivalent work of doing a phd + research fellowship or two. but i have the qualifications you cite and I'm doing the fast.ai courses to get a working knowledge of things and that seems to take 4-8 weeks depending on your pace
Would it even make sense if one's interest is not image or text generation?