I think this is mostly right. I'm currently enrolled in same the GaTech CS Masters that the author will be starting. I have had just two courses that strained

I think this is mostly right. I'm currently enrolled in same the GaTech CS Masters that the author will be starting. I have had just two courses that strained my machine out of the 7 I've completed. Reinforcement learning in particular had one project that really tested my machine. (I trained my agents on CPU, so that was definitely a factor). Even then, my agents were training in fairly reasonable times (5-6 hours max for a grid search). If I'd taken the time to vectorize every computation, I could have probably gotten the time down at least 10x. This is on AMD Ryzen 1700x - a pretty speedy chip but not top of the line - and 16 gb ram. Powerful hardware is a convenience more than anything in this program. It allows you to focus less on optimizing your solution.