The ‘AI Ready’ initiative offers online classes for developers and other technical professionals as well as for high school and university students.
On Nov. 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 across the globe with the skills needed for lucrative generative AI-focused careers by 2025. In addition, Amazon is offering cloud computing skills training.
“Amazon is launching AI Ready to help those with a desire 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.
Jump to:
The following generative AI training courses are available for free from Amazon via AWS Skill Builder for developer and technical audiences:
The following generative AI training courses are available for free from Amazon for beginners and students:
Many employers (73%) are interested in hiring people with AI-related skills, a November survey from Amazon and Access Partnership found. However, three out of four of the same employers have trouble finding people to meet their AI talent needs.
“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,” Sivasubramanian wrote in the announcement post.
Amazon will offer a total of $12 million over 50,000 Udacity scholarships for high school and university 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, career development resources and guidance in creating a professional portfolio.
Interested students can apply on the AWS AI & ML Scholarship program site.
In collaboration with Code.org, Amazon will host an Hour of Code during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 4–10, for students and teachers involved in kindergarten through 12th grade. The hour-long 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 Google Cloud and AWS Cloud’s capabilities as cloud hosting services.
These courses, scholarships and events come in addition to Amazon’s existing free cloud computing classes. Amazon has a goal of giving 29 million people the right skills for cloud computing careers by 2025.
Amazon also offers over 80 free and low cost training courses through AWS’s educational artificial intelligence and machine learning content library. Taking some of these courses alongside generative AI training could broaden one’s understanding of how different AWS and Amazon capabilities work together, as well as contextualizing their places in the larger world of AI and ML technologies.
