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Amazon has embarked on an ambitious journey to democratise AI education through its “AI Ready” initiative, aiming to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people by 2025. This ambitious goal is set against the backdrop of a burgeoning demand for AI talent, with studies indicating that workers skilled in AI could command up to 47% higher salaries. This move not only underscores the growing demand for AI talent across industries but also highlights Amazon’s commitment to making AI education accessible to a broader audience.

AI Ready Initiative Overview

The “AI Ready” program encompasses several key components designed to cater to both the current workforce and the next generation of AI professionals. These include eight new, free AI and generative AI courses that are open to anyone interested in pursuing a career in this transformative field. These courses are designed to cover a wide range of topics, from foundational to advanced levels, and are suited for business leaders as well as technologists​​​​.

Course Highlights and How to Enroll

1. Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence: This course provides a comprehensive introduction to generative AI, its applications, and essential concepts. It’s available on AWS Educate.
2. Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers: A three-course series that guides learners on planning and building a generative AI-ready organisation, available on AWS Skill Builder.
3. Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer: Participants will learn to use Amazon’s AI code generator, which produces whole lines of code, available on AWS Educate.
4. Foundations of Prompt Engineering: Available on AWS Skill Builder, this course introduces the basics of prompt engineering for generative AI tools.
5. Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS: This course is for those interested in preparing data, training machine learning models, and deploying them with minimal coding. It’s available on AWS Skill Builder.
6. Building Language Models on AWS: This course teaches using Amazon SageMaker for building and fine-tuning language models and is available on AWS Skill Builder.
7. Amazon Transcribe—Getting Started: An introductory course on using Amazon Transcribe to convert speech to text, available on AWS Skill Builder.
8. Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock: This course guides learners on using Amazon Bedrock to create generative AI applications, also available on AWS Skill Builder​​​​.

Scholarships and Further Opportunities

To further support the accessibility of AI education, AWS is offering the AWS Generative AI Scholarship, which provides more than $12 million in scholarships to over 50,000 high school and university students globally. This scholarship aims to empower students from underserved and underrepresented communities with free courses, hands-on projects, and career development resources.

Additionally, Amazon and Code.org have partnered to introduce students to coding and AI through the Hour of Code, an initiative that combines creativity with learning by allowing students to create their dance choreographies using generative AI​​​​.

Amazon’s AI Ready initiative is a significant step towards bridging the AI skills gap, providing free, high-quality AI education to millions worldwide. By offering a range of courses that cater to various skill levels and professional backgrounds, Amazon is ensuring that the workforce of tomorrow is equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to thrive in an AI-driven world.