I don’t think it makes a difference unless you can publish it somewhere recognizable / gain high academic impact. In this case, thesis programs might grant you more time (taking less course) and mentorship to achieve that goal.

AI truely has no mercy, the first job OpenAI took is its CEO’s.

Just get Colab Pro+ already. For hobbyist exploration, there really is little-to-zero need to run anything local when you can just pop up a notebook with cloud GPU access, especially when your local environment is not even X86+Nvidia.

Colab Pro+ costs $50/month and grants you 500 compute units. 40G A100 rate is like 13-ish unit/hr, and V100 is like 6-ish unit or something; there is option to get T4 with even lower cost if you just want CUDA. Get a local editor - google drive - colab workflow and you are good.