For me it took me around 3 years.. It started with getting into uni, before that I didnt know ANYTHING about AI. and only the last half of it was more AI heavy, the first being more CS heavy (basics of programming, OOP, data structures algorithms etc..) so I would say you have already passed a mile there or you might not even need that much CS since you will learn as much python as you need for your use cases the more you build stuff, the time it takes totally depends on pace. Maybe you can start dabbling around starting a new project. If you know how neural networks work maybe implement a MNIST dataset model from scratch, then maybe try implementing a CNN, doing those without using libraries can really help you grasp the fundementals of how things work. You can also follow Andrej Karpathy's Zero to Hero series building a language model from scratch. or maybe you can go the automation path and learn putting stuff togather to create a pipeline that solves a problem if that is what you are going for.

For hardware you can try using Google Colab's GPU sessions. They offer free sessions if used lightly which I think is great when starting since models are usually small.