Andrej Karpathy's Zero to Hero video series [1] is a good middle ground. It isn't super low-level but it also isn't super high-level. I think seeing how the pieces actually fit together in a working project is valuable to get a real understanding.
After going through this series I can say I basically understand weights, tokens, back-propagation, layers, embeddings, etc.
I'm working my way through that series now. He really is a good teacher -- I keep waiting for the inevitable "Next, draw the rest of the fucking owl" moment, but so far he does seem to be sticking to his commitment to a from-scratch approach.
After going through this series I can say I basically understand weights, tokens, back-propagation, layers, embeddings, etc.
1. https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html