I'm not sure why people are telling you professional stuff. You do you.
I am an ML researcher working on generative modeling. I think you have enough experience that you'll catch up quickly. But the question is most what you're interested in? With that I can give better advice. Don't let anyone stop you from learning just to learn. Not everything has to be a career. A lot of us got here because it's fun.
I do think you'll pick up diffusion models quickly. I like the explicit density side of things more and density estimation. So I like Song's works and similar with Kingma. Also check out Lilian Wang's blogs. They are a wealth of material and sources. Can't go wrong there. You'll find that diffusion and VAEs are kinda similar. The difficulty you'll have in understanding something like stable diffusion is actually the programming (at least this was the hardest part for me).
I am an ML researcher working on generative modeling. I think you have enough experience that you'll catch up quickly. But the question is most what you're interested in? With that I can give better advice. Don't let anyone stop you from learning just to learn. Not everything has to be a career. A lot of us got here because it's fun.
I do think you'll pick up diffusion models quickly. I like the explicit density side of things more and density estimation. So I like Song's works and similar with Kingma. Also check out Lilian Wang's blogs. They are a wealth of material and sources. Can't go wrong there. You'll find that diffusion and VAEs are kinda similar. The difficulty you'll have in understanding something like stable diffusion is actually the programming (at least this was the hardest part for me).
Good luck and let me know if I can help.