The ‘AI Ready’ initiative offers online classes for developers and other technical professionals, as well as high school and college students.
On November 20, Amazon revealed the “AI Ready” commitment, a set of courses, a scholarship, and a collaboration with Code.org to promote generative artificial intelligence skills. Amazon wants to provide 2 million people around the world with the skills needed for lucrative careers focused on generative AI by 2025. Additionally, Amazon offers training in cloud computing skills.
“Amazon is launching AI Ready to help those who want to learn about AI and benefit from the tremendous opportunity ahead,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services, wrote in Amazon’s announcement.
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Free Generative AI Training Courses for Professionals and Beginners
The following generative AI training courses are available for free on Amazon through AWS Skill Builder for developers and technical audiences:
- Fundamentals of rapid engineering.
- Low-code machine learning on AWS.
- Creating language models in AWS.
- Amazon Transcribe: introduction.
- Building generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock.
The following generative AI training courses are available for free on Amazon for beginners and students:
Employers are looking for AI skills
Many employers (73%) are interested in hiring people with AI-related skills, according to a November survey from Amazon and Access Partnership. However, three in four of the same employers are having trouble finding people to meet their AI talent needs.
“If we want to unlock the full potential of AI to address the world’s most challenging problems, we must make AI education accessible to anyone who wants to learn,” Sivasubramanian wrote in the announcement post.
AWS Generative AI Scholarship Helps High School and College Students
Amazon will offer a total of $12 million in more than 50,000 Udacity scholarships to high school and college students from underserved and underrepresented communities around the world. Scholarship recipients will gain access to free courses, hands-on projects, on-demand technical tutors, coaching industry mentors, professional development resources, and guidance on building a professional portfolio.
Interested students can apply on the AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program site.
Amazon and Code.org team up for Hour of Code for students
In collaboration with Code.org, Amazon will host an Hour of Code during Computer Science Education Week, December 4-10, for students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade. The one-hour introduction to coding and AI will invite students to create their own dance choreography using generative AI.
Code.org runs on AWS and Amazon has provided free AWS cloud computing credits worth up to $8 million for the Hour of Code.
SEE: Compare the capabilities of Google Cloud and AWS Cloud as cloud hosting services.
AI Ready Courses Add to Existing Library of AI and Cloud Resources
These courses, scholarships, and events are in addition to Amazon’s existing free cloud computing classes. Amazon aims to provide 29 million people with the right skills for careers in cloud computing by 2025.
Amazon also offers more than 80 free and low-cost training courses through the AWS AI and ML educational content library. Taking some of these courses alongside generative AI training could broaden your understanding of how different AWS and Amazon capabilities work together, as well as contextualize their places in the broader world of AI and ML technologies.
