Highlights:

  • AWS will offer eight AI training courses online for free as part of the initiative.
  • AWS’s recently introduced learning resources will complement the existing array of over 80 AI courses already available to users of its cloud platform.

Amazon Web Services Inc. recently introduced AI Ready, a novel initiative to provide artificial intelligence skills to 2 million individuals by 2025.

Swami Sivasubramanian, the Vice President of Data and AI at Amazon Web Services, said, “Artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology of our generation. If we are going to unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world’s most challenging problems, we need to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn.”

AWS will offer eight AI training courses online for free as part of the initiative. Of the eight courses, three are tailored for individuals without programming experience, while the remaining courses are specifically designed for developers. Most of these courses provide participants with materials to acquaint themselves with AWS’s AI services.

Those embarking on their upskilling journey can initiate it with “Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence,” a course that delves into fundamental concepts in generative AI and explores its common applications. The additional two courses AWS provides for non-technical learners delve into more advanced topics. One course is crafted to instruct business leaders on planning generative AI projects, while the other introduces AWS CodeWhisperer—an AI service facilitating software writing through natural language prompts.

The five courses tailored for developers encompass a more extensive array of topics. Three developer-focused courses concentrate on AWS offerings: the Amazon Bedrock collection of managed generative AI models, the Amazon Transcribe transcription service, and Amazon SageMaker. The final offering is not a single product but a compilation of tools enabling software teams to construct, operate, and deploy neural networks.

AWS also provides two developer courses for individuals with relatively limited coding expertise. One course centers on prompt engineering, involving the manual tuning of AI prompts to enhance the quality of the output generated by a neural network. The second course is dedicated to instructing engineers on preparing training data, constructing AI models, and deploying those models utilizing AWS’ low-code development tools.

In addition to the fresh training courses, AWS’ AI Ready initiative will introduce two new educational programs. These programs will be launched with the online learning provider Udacity Inc. and the nonprofit organization Code.org.

The first program is named the AWS Generative AI Scholarship. This initiative entails the cloud giant granting Udacity scholarships to over 50,000 high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities. Valued at over USD 12 million, these scholarships offer access to an AWS-developed generative AI course on Udacity’s platform.

Simultaneously, the cloud giant will allocate up to USD 8 million in cloud credits to Code.org.

Code.org will utilize the infrastructure supplied by AWS to bolster its Hour of Code learning initiative, which aims to empower students with programming skills. As a component of this collaboration, the cloud giant is introducing a specialized AI edition of the Hour of Code.

AWS’s recently introduced learning resources will complement the existing array of over 80 AI courses already available to users of its cloud platform.
Among these courses, some are crafted to assist customers in becoming acquainted with AWS services, while others guide developers in implementing AI use cases, such as creating chatbots.