Master LLMs from Scratch in 60 Days: 8 Essential Papers
thisguyknowsai · x · 2026-08-11
The author shares a roadmap for learning Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch in 60 days. Instead of watching fragmented YouTube tutorials, they recommend reading and implementing these 8 core papers:
- Attention Is All You Need (2017): The foundation of the Transformer architecture.
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020): The GPT-3 paper demonstrating few-shot learning.
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020): Revealing the scaling laws of models.
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2022): Chain-of-thought prompting technique.
- Training Language Models to Follow Instructions (2022): InstructGPT paper on instruction fine-tuning and RLHF.
- LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation (2021): The standard parameter-efficient fine-tuning method.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2020): RAG technology.
- Direct Preference Optimization (2023): The DPO algorithm.
The suggested pace is one paper per week, with hands-on implementation of the core mechanisms.
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