I think you have listed 8 strategies that are both good, and you ordered them in most important strategies first.
For courses, Andrew Ng’s classes have always been good, starting with his Stanford ML class, Coursera deep learning classes, and now his short mini-classes on being an effective LLM practitioner.
Textbooks on LLMs are likely to quickly be out of date, at least I struggle to keep my LangChain/LlamaIndex book current.
My advice to you is to try to get into a paid AI job as your highest priority, and that is a lot of work: identifying possible employers, preparing for interviews, and having persistence. Some of the interesting AI work you might find will not be with “tech” companies, but rather small or medium profitable businesses that need to use ML, DL, LLMs lightly - just a small part of their successful businesses.
For courses, Andrew Ng’s classes have always been good, starting with his Stanford ML class, Coursera deep learning classes, and now his short mini-classes on being an effective LLM practitioner.
Textbooks on LLMs are likely to quickly be out of date, at least I struggle to keep my LangChain/LlamaIndex book current.
My advice to you is to try to get into a paid AI job as your highest priority, and that is a lot of work: identifying possible employers, preparing for interviews, and having persistence. Some of the interesting AI work you might find will not be with “tech” companies, but rather small or medium profitable businesses that need to use ML, DL, LLMs lightly - just a small part of their successful businesses.