Amazon providing free artificial intelligence skills training
A new program from Amazon aims to train 2 million people globally to work in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2025 – with no charge.
Amazon's new “AI Ready” program features three initiatives, including eight new, free AI and generative AI courses open to anyone and aligned with "in-demand jobs," the company said. The classes will be available through Amazon's learning website.
“Artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology of our generation,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Data and AI at AWS, said in a corporate blog post. “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."
The other two initiatives include:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Generative AI Scholarship, providing more than 50,000 high school and university students globally with access to a new generative AI course on Udacity; and
- New collaboration with Code.org designed to help students learn about generative AI.
More details on each initiative follow:
Free courses
The new courses augment the more than 80 low-cost and free AI and generative AI courses and resources that Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud division is providing as part of the $100 million AWS Generative AI Innovation Center project it launched in June 2023.
The offerings are broken down into two categories, with courses for business and non-technical audiences and courses for developer and technical audiences.
Scholarships
AWS will provide scholarships valued at more than $12 million for courses at for-profit online education company Udacity to more than 50,000 high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities globally.
Eligible students can take the new Udacity course “Introducing Generative AI” with AWS for free. The course, which was designed by AI experts at AWS, introduces students to foundational generative AI concepts and guides them through a hands-on project. Upon successful course completion, students earn a certificate from Udacity to showcase their knowledge to future employers.
Code.org collaboration
Amazon is partnering with computer science non-profit Code.org to launch “Hour of Code Dance Party: AI edition.” During this hour-long introduction to coding and AI, students will create their own virtual music video.
Hour of Code will take place globally during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 4–10, engaging students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade. Additionally, AWS is providing up to $8 million in AWS Cloud computing credits to Code.org, which runs on AWS, to further support Hour of Code.
Amazon’s new AI Ready commitment is in addition to AWS’s commitment to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people by 2025. The company says this effort, introduced in 2020, has already trained more than 21 million people.
Amazon delves deeper into AI
In September, Amazon agreed to invest up to $4 billion in San Francisco-based generative AI developer Anthropic, which is making a long-term commitment to provide global AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS.
Amazon has already been leveraging advanced AI to support initiatives as varied as creating third-party seller product listings, counterfeit detection, inventory handling and tailoring video shopping content.