There are maybe ~20-25 papers that matter. Implement those and you’ve captured ~90% of the alpha behind modern LLMs. Everything else is garnish. You want that list? Look no more... The Top 26 Essential Papers (+5 Bonus Resources) for Mastering LLMs and Transformers This list bridges the Transformer foundations with the reasoning, MoE, and agentic shift Recommended Reading Order 1. Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017) > The original Transformer paper. Covers self-attention, > multi-head attention, and the encoder-decoder structure > (even though most modern LLMs are decoder-only.) 2. The Illustrated Transformer (Jay Alammar, 2018) > Great intuition builder for understanding > attention and tensor flow before diving into implementations 3. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers (Devlin et al., 2018) > Encoder-side fundamentals, masked language modeling, > and representation learning that still shape modern architectures 4. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3) (Brown et al., 2020) > Established in-context learning as a real...