With the growing needs of AI, intelligent minds don't come easy. This is where Amazon wants to help.
The e-commerce titan has been into machine learning for quite a while, with learning courses available to its employees. This is changing as the company announced that it's making the range of courses available to all developers signed up to its AWS platform, for free.
There are initially 30+ digital machine learning courses in total, with more than 45 long hours of documentation material, videos, as well as lab tests.
Amazon said that the contents should address beginners, advanced developers, and everyone in between.
According to Matt Wood, AWS's general manager of artificial intelligence:
The course starts with the fundamental steps in machine learning concepts, with the goal to teach how to make one with real-world examples.
Some of the examples Amazon provides include: machine learning in predicting gift wrapping eligibility for products in a store, optimizing delivery routes, and predicting entertainment award nominations using data from an Amazon subsidiary IMDb's massive database of information about movies.
With this program, Amazon targets four groups of people: developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business professionals.
Developers, for example, are offered courses that teach machine-learning building blocks, how to build machine-learning applications, computer vision and natural language processing.
For business leaders on the other hand, the courses are more to demystify artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, as well as helping them understand the terminology and how to use AWS machine-learning services to build models and add intelligence to apps.
While the courses are free, but those who want to learn would still have to pay for cloud services for lab testing. There is also an exam where interested individuals can earn an 'AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty' certification, for the price of $300 (initially discounted 50 percent to $150).
Part of the idea is to help employees to get hired more efficiently.
Previously, Amazon’s cloud competitor Google, has partnered with Coursera and launched a free crash course and a paid specialization course on machine learning recently. Microsoft also has a similar paid program to train developers on the topic.