Amazon Web Services Inc. today debuted AI Ready, a new initiative through which it hopes to equip 2 million people with artificial intelligence skills by 2025.

“Artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology of our generation,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS. “If we are going to unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world’s most challenging problems, we need to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn.”

The push will see AWS make eight AI training courses available online at no charge. Three are designed for learners without programming experience, while the others are geared toward developers. Most of the courses include materials that can help participants familiarize themselves with AWS’ lineup of AI services.

Learners at the beginning of their upskilling journey can start with Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence, which covers basic concepts in generative AI and common uses for the technology. The two other courses that AWS offers for nontechnical learners cover more advanced topics. One is designed to teach business leaders how to plan generative AI projects, while the other provides an introduction to AWS CodeWhisperer, an AI service that makes it possible to write software with natural language prompts.

The five courses for developers cover a broader range of topics. Three focus on specific AWS offerings: the Amazon Bedrock collection of managed generative AI models, the Amazon Transcribe transcription service and Amazon SageMaker. The last offering is not one product, but rather a collection of tools that software teams can use to build, run and deploy neural networks.

AWS is also offering two developer courses that require relatively limited coding know-how. One focuses on prompt engineering, or the process of manually tuning AI prompts to improve the quality of the output that a neural network generates. The other course will teach engineers how to prepare training data, build AI models and deploy those models using AWS’ low-code development tools.

Alongside the new training courses, AWS’ new AI Ready initiative will see it launch two new educational programs. They will be rolled out in partnership with online learning provider Udacity Inc. and the nonprofit Code.org.

The first program is called the AWS Generative AI Scholarship. It will see the cloud giant provide Udacity scholarships to more than 50,000 high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities. The scholarships, which are worth over $12 million, provide access to an AWS-developed generative AI course hosted on Udacity’s platform.

In parallel, the cloud giant will provide up to $8 million worth of cloud credits to Code.org. The nonprofit will use the infrastructure provided by AWS to support its Hour of Code learning initiative, which focuses on equipping students with programming skills. As part of the collaboration, the cloud giant is also launching a specialized AI edition of Hour of Code.

The new learning resources AWS is releasing will join the more than 80 AI courses that it already offers to users of its cloud platform. Some of those courses are designed help customers familiarize themselves with AWS services, while others teach developers how to implement AI use cases such as chatbots.

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