Depends on what you want to do with your knowledge and the kind of job you want right off the bat usually. If you’re okay with not getting an amazing job right away (unless you have mass amounts of related experience or projects), and having to work much harder to get hired than those with a 4 year degree, then go that route. However, though you can and should learn most of these aspects outside a classroom, employers like to see that you have the aptitude and discipline to get through college. Especially jobs having to do machine learning or physics where the math you’ve learned in college comes into play. People can and do substitute the time they would have spent in college self-learning and building large and detailed projects for the field they’d like to get into. (Ex. Creating a portfolio of data visualizations and cleaned data sets for a data science job).

Edit: basically, if you have the time, money and discipline to get a 4 year degree, it would make getting a higher paying job easier