I think I was unclear. We're in agreement. I already do plenty of it in my spare time, like you suggest, and I'd love to expand the spare time stuff. What I was

I think I was unclear. We're in agreement. I already do plenty of it in my spare time, like you suggest, and I'd love to expand the spare time stuff. What I was trying to add was that since I'd prefer to do it less than 40 hours per week, I wish there was a paid way to do it less than 40 hours per week. The status quo doesn't have much room for paid part-time work in this line of business, and that makes me sad. And depending what you're doing, it can require ridiculous computational resources (like hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a model), but that's far from the norm. If you aren't trying to advance a couple particular states of the art, you can get by with a fancy computer and patience, or a pretty reasonable AWS/GCP bill, probably comparable to any other fairly expensive hobby.