Amazon announced free courses to teach workers skills related to artificial intelligence as the tech giant competes for talent with rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI.
The initiative, called “AI Ready,” includes eight “free AI and generative AI courses,” which Amazon hopes will teach up to 2 million people by 2025 about this increasingly ubiquitous technology, the company said in a statement. advertisement Shared Monday.
The courses are aimed at business and non-technical audiences or professional developers, and cover topics such as “introduction to generative artificial intelligence”, “fundamentals of rapid engineering” and “low-code machine learning on AWS”, the computing company in Amazon cloud, Amazon Web. Services.
In a bid to appeal to students, Amazon’s AI Ready ad cites a AWS studio It found that 73% of employers are prioritizing hiring talent trained in AI and are willing to pay up to 47% more in salaries for workers trained in this area.
“If we want to unlock the full potential of AI to address the world’s most challenging problems, we must make AI education accessible to anyone who wants to learn,” Amazon said.
Jenni Troutman, director of Products and Services, Training and Certification at AWS, told The Post: “At AWS, we believe that skills training and certification have the power to transform organizations and change people’s careers and lives.” .
“AI Ready is an extension of our focus on making AI and ML skills training and education accessible to everyone, and we are proud to offer new free courses and programs, and scholarships to anyone who wants to learn,” said Troutman. .
The launch of AI Ready reflects the changing corporate landscape, which has been so affected by AI that there have been cases where humans who were outperformed by AI-backed technology were fired from their jobs.
Many of the changes brought about by AI are therefore expected to require workers to learn new skills or receive additional training to keep up.
At the moment, highly skilled AI talent is difficult to find, to the point that major tech companies are increasing salaries and benefits in a bid to retain their workers in a competitive labor market.
In February, Amazon doubled his base salary limit for corporate employees at $350,000.
At the time, the company described it as facing a “particularly competitive labor market.”
Microsoft also said earlier this year that it would “nearly double” its budget for employee pay as part of its retention efforts.
The Seattle-based tech giant also increased the scope of its stock-based compensation by at least 25%.
“This increased investment in our global compensation reflects the continued commitment we have to providing a highly competitive experience to our employees,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to The Post at the time.
A report published last week revealed that OpenAI did the same, and the ChatGPT creator’s recruiting team has been offering hefty salary packages worth up to $10 million in an effort to lure top AI talent away from Google.
OpenAI’s recruiting team has been fielding some of Google’s top AI talent ahead of a planned employee stock sale that will boost OpenAI’s valuation above $80 billion, according to a report.
Employees are told they can close packages at the company’s current valuation of about $27 billion and see an increase in value when the stock sale closes.
Major deals could be worth between $5 million and $10 million, The information reportedciting sources familiar with the matter.
Evidently, employee retention has weighed more on these lucrative companies than inflation, which has suffocated the US economy since last June, when it peaked at 9.1%.
So far, Google “doesn’t seem to be matching the offerings,” a source told the outlet, although the company has been ramping up its AI efforts elsewhere.
Last week, Reuters reported that Google, which operates the Bard AI chatbot, was in talks to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Character.AI, an AI bot startup developed by two former Google employees.
