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AWS Details Plan to Expand AI Education
The AI skills market is currently experiencing high demand. In response to this demand, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is initiating a two-year AI training program named "AI Ready" to assist workers in capitalizing on the growing need for AI expertise.
AWS unveiled the AI Ready program earlier this month with the objective of educating up to 2 million individuals, including both technical and non-technical backgrounds, in AI and generative AI by 2025. This initiative has received support from educational institutions such as Udacity and Code.org. AWS, however, already offers several of its own programs dedicated to AI education and training.
The AI Ready program mirrors what AWS has already been doing in cloud education; in 2020, the company
announced a goal to train 29 million people on cloud computing by 2025. (Since then, AWS says it has already trained 21 million people.)
As part of AI Ready, AWS is launching a scholarship program with Udacity to provide $12 million in scholarships to 50,000 high school and college students "from underserved and underrepresented communities."
According to the announcement, "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."
More information on the scholarship program is available here.
AWS also announced eight new and no-cost AI training courses as part of AI Ready, adding to its existing library of educational AI and machine learning resources.
The new courses are appropriate for technical learners (Foundations of Prompt Engineering, Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS, Building Language Models on AWS, Getting Started with Amazon Transcribe, Building Generative AI Apps Using Amazon Bedrock) and nontechnical learners (Intro to Generative AI, Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers, Intro to Amazon CodeWhisperer).
Finally, AWS is collaborating with Code.org on the "Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition." Aimed at children from kindergarten through 12th grade, this beginners program will introduce students to the basics of generative AI and large language models.
AWS is directing $8 million in cloud credits toward Code.org and the Hour of Code program.
"Amazon is launching AI Ready to help those with a desire to learn about AI and benefit from the tremendous opportunity ahead," said AWS AI chief Swami Sivasubramanian in the program's launch announcement. "The...initiatives are designed to open opportunities to those in the workforce today as well as the future generation."