I don't have an ML background and I had no problem understanding the LeCun 1998 paper. Naturally, the more ML one knows the better, I'm just encouraging people to dive in and try without getting intimidated.
Anecdotally, one astonishing observation I often make is that "breakthrough" papers [1] are nearly universally among the most accessible, clear and easy to follow. From Watson and Crick on DNA in MolBio, to Backpropagation by Hinton in ML, to Cox' survival model in Statistics, the most significant advances often tend to be the "easiest" to understand (in hindsight only, naturally).
