Andrew Ng's course definitely requires some linear algebra knowledge, and explains how things work under the hood.
Same goes for fast.ai
I think even that level of knowledge is not always necessary. Often, just having the intuitive understanding can be enough to get great results e.g: understand that this is a black box that takes features in, predicts things, and you have to help it by giving good features; or understand that word2vec builds vector representations based on words that co-occur in the same context.
I think even that level of knowledge is not always necessary. Often, just having the intuitive understanding can be enough to get great results e.g: understand that this is a black box that takes features in, predicts things, and you have to help it by giving good features; or understand that word2vec builds vector representations based on words that co-occur in the same context.