Honestly, focus on prototyping! Hiring managers here go crazy for people who ship fast. Grab a NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8GB to build out your local experiments. It is a fantastic way to show off your skills. Being able to explain your code in a blog post is cool, but having a working demo that actually runs is basically a golden ticket in the Bay Area right now. Go get it!

Like someone mentioned, prototyping is key, but honestly dont dump your whole savings on hardware. I bought a NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 32GB expecting perfection and had issues with the cooling system, honestly it was not as good as expected for the price. Are you mostly focused on vision or LLMs?

• Try a used NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X instead
• Cloud credits are way cheaper Save the cash for a solid GPU setup that actually lasts.

Late to the party, but honestly, focus on communication if you actually want to survive long term. Prototypes break and specs change constantly, which is something I learned the hard way after sinking cash into gear that just sat there collecting dust.

• What specific subfield are you targeting?
• What is your actual budget for the pivot? Unfortunately, quick fixes rarely help when you need to explain your architecture to non-technical stakeholders.