Amazon looking to help 2M people grow their AI skills
Amazon is looking to help grow the artificial intelligence-related skills of 2 million people by halfway through the decade with the technology continuing to rapidly grow.
The e-commerce and tech giant committed to doing so in a Monday blog post written by AWS Vice President of Data and AI Swami Sivasubramanian, saying its efforts to accomplish that would involve three initiatives. It dubbed the endeavor "AI Ready."
The move is meant to "help those with a desire to learn about AI and benefit from the tremendous opportunity ahead," according to Amazon.
The overall AI sector and technology related to generative AI in particular have become increasingly hot in the past year or so, with many major tech companies vying for dominance. OpenAI debuting chatbot ChatGPT to the public in November of last year helped spark that growth.
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Amazon also argued the "need for an AI-savvy workforce has never been greater," pointing to data from an AWS/Access Partnership regarding hiring workers with AI skills and AI use plans by businesses.
Part of its "AI Ready" effort will involve courses for "business and nontechnical audiences" and "developer and technical audiences" that will be available at no charge. There are eight new trainings rolling out in total for the groups, the company said.
The other two segments of "AI Ready" appeared to focus more on students.
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It has an "Hour of Code Dance Part: AI Edition" activity slated to happen in December, with participating students getting the opportunity to "create their own virtual music video set to hit songs" using coding and AI prompts, according to Amazon.
Meanwhile, over 50,000 high school and college students will receive scholarships to cover the cost of an Udacity course focused on generative AI, the company said. Amazon estimated the scholarships would be worth over $12 million collectively.
Code.org, the organization it is putting on the "Hour of Code" event with, will also get a maximum of $8 million worth of AWS Cloud computing credits.
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In mid-September, LinkedIn put out a survey that found most professionals around the world "are excited to embrace AI." It also indicated 49% had concerns that their current level of knowledge about AI needed to be wider than it currently was, according to LinkedIn.
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That LinkedIn survey came after the job posting site had previously reported it had seen a skyrocketing amount of job advertisements referencing AI compared to November of last year.