genAI career build

I’ll join LLM/genAI related infra teams. Since it’s big tech so scope will be limited to certain infra. But I find so many subfields of genAI are thriving such as modeling, LLM training/inference infra, RAG, vector search/NLP, customized storage for LLM etc, many of which are just getting started and under research and exploration. These are all obviously opportunities. I feel so passionate about genAI, so in addition to my company work, I’m highly motivated to self learn as much as I can to be an expert. So I could start working on personal side project? There are tons of such YouTube, GitHub resources. For example if I work on RAG at company, in parallel I can learn to play with model fine-tuning myself in spare time. But would such self-learn and toy project be sufficient? Should I consider internal team switch later to best learn from real-world production work? Anyone in genAI/LLM please share your career build path! Thanks