Firm in its belief that the best way to get to grips with generative artificial intelligence is with hands-on experience, Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a series of educational courses for people of all experience levels.

Generative AI has captured widespread attention this year through the emergence of chatbots with humanlike qualities, such as ChatGPT. According to AWS, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, the growing interest in the technology suggests we’ve reached an inflection point in the mass adoption of AI, which will transform both applications and customer experiences like never before.

As a result, AWS said, it’s keen to help people better understand this transformative new technology through its new training courses. They’re aimed at a fairly wide swath of individuals, including novice developers wanting to explore generative AI-assisted coding, data scientists and engineers looking to train and deploy new foundational models, executives seeking to learn how generative AI can solve business challenges, and AWS partners wishing to help their customers get to grips with generative AI technologies.

For nontechnical users, AWS has created a new introductory coding course for Amazon CodeWhisperer, a code-generating companion that provides generative AI-powered suggestions and recommendations. The initial course is all about discovering the capabilities of Amazon CodeWhisperer and setting it up, while the AWS Jam Journey course is a more interactive, hands-on module for users to gain practical experience.

For developers and technical audiences, Generative AI Foundations on AWS is a free, on-demand technical deep dive into those who are already familiar with AI models. It covers conceptual fundamentals, practical advice and hands-on guidance on how to train, fine-tune and then deploy advanced foundational models on AWS and other cloud platforms.

The Generative AI with Large Language Models is also aimed at technical users. It’s a three-week course that aims to help data scientists and engineers develop their expertise in selecting, training, fine-tuning and deploying LLMs for real-world applications.

AWS is also offering the PartnerCast course for AWS Partners. It’s a series that helps partners to explore the generative AI service offerings on AWS, including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon CodeWhisperer, and how they can be leveraged to help their own customers.

Finally, business executives can expand their knowledge through Generative AI for Executives, which is a collection of brief, easy-to-understand videos that explore how generative AI can address various business challenges.

The huge interest in generative AI has led to the birth of a cottage industry offering a rapid path to AI expertise, said Constellation Research Inc. Vice President and Principal Analyst Andy Thurai, as everyone looks to cash in on the industry. While many of the available courses are good, there is a lot of snake oil that enterprises must watch out for.

“Amazon’s low-cost and free generative AI courses will put a dent in that parade, and it needs to do so because, although it has been successful at wooing developers, it has come under pressure as a result of Microsoft and OpenAI bringing AI to the masses with ChatGPT,” Thurai said. “They are forcing AWS to offer solutions geared towards non-geeky personnel, and these courses are a great first step towards democratizing its AI solutions.”

The analyst said he thinks the new courses will help AWS to create more traction with business decision-makers, educating them on the business use cases of generative AI and enabling it to sell its AI services top-down at the executive level. Even so, Thurai warned  enterprises against expecting any miracles. “You can’t just get people to take a few courses on Amazon CodeWhisperer and expect them to be able to write highly efficient code. That would lead to disastrous, half-baked code that’s inefficient and vulnerable,” Thurai said. “You always need an experienced, human-in-the-loop with any developer productivity tool in order to validate the code before it hits production.”

The new training courses are available through Amazon’s digital learning centers AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate, adding to an extensive library of more than 80 learning resources focused on AI and machine learning.

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