On November 20, local time, Amazon announced the launch of the "AI Ready" program, which is expected to provide free artificial intelligence (AI) skills training to 2 million people worldwide by 2025, in order to gain an advantage in the fierce talent competition with Microsoft, Google and other companies.。

Not to be left behind, "AI Ready" enhances talent competitiveness

As generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has become increasingly popular in the tech industry, Microsoft and Alphabet have invested heavily in the field and ChatGPT, while Amazon has been concentrating its AI technology in the cloud computing business, so it has less momentum than the former.。After falling behind its rivals, Amazon has been trying to whip up interest in the Gen AI space。

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expects Gen AI to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AWS in the next few years, and AI is touching every aspect of Amazon。The company announced in September that it had agreed to invest $4 billion in Anthropic; Anthropic also agreed to use Amazon's custom chips to build and deploy its AI software.。

Today, the corporate world is increasingly aware that AI could change the way countless people work.。From real estate to retail, companies from all walks of life are experimenting with Gen AI to produce marketing materials, write software code, and answer questions in human resources.。AWS research has found that:

• Seventy-three percent of companies say hiring AI talent is a top priority, but three-quarters of them say they can't meet the demand for AI talent.。
• If employees acquire AI skills, they can increase their salary by 47%。
• AI will become an integral part of the way business is conducted, with 93% of enterprises expecting to apply AI solutions across their organization in the next five years。

It is understood that the "AI Ready" project contains three new initiatives:

Focus on 8 free AI online courses, focusing on the field of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), targeting technical and related staff;

Collaborate with online learning platform Udacity to launch the new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Gen AI Scholarship.

③ and Code.org launches collaboration to help students understand Gen AI。

With Gen AI as the axis, eight courses are fully open

AWS says the eight free online courses are open to everyone and aligned with in-demand positions。The courses are suitable for both beginners and experienced people and complement the company's more than 80 free educational resources。

Courses for commercial and non-technical personnel include:

• Introduction to Gen AI: An introduction to Gen AI, applications of Gen AI, and related concepts (e.g., underlying models)。
• Gen AI Learning Program for Decision Makers: A series of courses on how to plan a Gen AI project and build a Gen AI organization。
• Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer: Teach students how to use Amazon's AI code generator to generate whole lines of code。

Courses for developers and technicians include:

• Fundamentals of Prompt Engineering: Introduces the basics of Prompt Engineering, the practice of designing Gen AI tools, and advanced prompting techniques。
• Low-Code Machine Learning for AWS: Explains how to prepare data, train, and deploy machine learning models with minimal coding without specialized machine learning knowledge。
• Building Language Models at AWS: Covers how to use Amazon Sage Maker's distributed training library to build language models and fine-tune open source and base models。
• Getting Started with Amazon Transcribe: Discover how to use Amazon Transcribe, a fully managed AI service that converts speech to text using automatic speech recognition technology。
• Building Gen AI Applications with Amazon Bedrock: Teach how to use the Amazon Bedrock platform to build Gen AI applications。

Launched Gen AI Scholarship, full completion of classes without worry

Not only that, but in order to make the training more inclusive, AWS has also provided scholarships for the project.。

Through the AWS Gen AI Scholarship, AWS will offer more than $12 million worth of Udacity courses - Introducing Gen AI through AWS - free to more than 50,000 high school and college students from underserved and underrepresented communities around the world.。

Designed by AWS's AI experts, the course introduces students to the basic concepts of Gen AI and guides them through hands-on projects.。Upon completion of the course, students will receive a certificate of completion from Udacity, which can be identified on their resume。

Edutainment, "one hour of programming" to achieve learning while playing

Amazon is also working with Code..org to collaborate and offer $8 million worth of AWS cloud computing credits to launch "One Hour of Programming" campaign。The event will take place worldwide during Computer Science Education Week from December 4 to December 10 and will attract students and teachers from Year 12 and earlier.。

This hour-long introductory course in coding and AI will introduce participants to Gen AI, including learning large language models (LLMs) and how to use them for predictive analytics to create new images, text, and more。Students will create their own virtual MV highlights of hit songs, code the dance of virtual dancers, and use emoticons as AI cues to generate animated backgrounds.。

In addition to the "AI Ready" initiative, AWS has pledged to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud skills training to 29 million people by 2025, and has trained more than 21 million people so far.。

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and artificial intelligence at AWS, said: "AI is the most transformative technology of our time, and to unlock its full potential, AI education must be accessible to all who are willing to learn.。According to him, "AI Ready" will level the playing field for AI education, and Amazon will also expand existing free AI training programs and courses and continue to remove related cost barriers.。