Amazon Pledges to Train 2 Million People in AI Skills by 2025

In a new initiative dubbed "AI Ready," Amazon is committing to provide free artificial intelligence skills training and education to 2 million people globally by 2025. The effort adds to the company's existing investments in cloud computing skills training, which have already provided free training to more than 21 million people in in-demand tech skills.

The AI Ready initiative will tackle the demand for AI talent both by scaling Amazon's existing free AI training programs and by launching new programs aimed at both adults and young learners. Those efforts include:

  • Eight new free AI and generative AI courses, covering various skill levels and levels of technical expertise, open to all learners. These courses, available on AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate, will expand Amazon's existing portfolio of 80-plus free and low-cost AI and generative AI courses and resources. Titles include "Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence" and "Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers" (for business and non-technical audiences), and "Foundations of Prompt Engineering," "Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS," and "Building Language Models on AWS" (for developers and technical audiences).
  • The AWS Generative AI Scholarship will provide more than $12 million in Udacity scholarships to 50,000-plus high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities around the globe. Eligible students will receive free access to the Udacity Course "Introducing Generative AI with AWS," including practical training and hands-on labs, and earn a certificate upon completion.
  • A new "Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition," taking place globally Dec. 4–10, 2023, will offer students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade an introduction to coding and AI through a virtual music video project. "Students will code their virtual dancer's choreography and use emojis as AI prompts to generate animated backgrounds," according to a news announcement. "The activity will give participants an introduction to generative AI, including learning about large language models and how they are used to power the predictive analytics responsible for creating new images, text, and more." The event is a collaboration between Amazon Future Engineer and Code.org.

For more information, read the Amazon blog post.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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