Amazon's internal machine learning courses are now open to all

The e-commerce giant Amazon announced to offer for free the same Machine Learning courses that trained its own engineers.  The courses offered include more than 45 hours of 30 self-service, self-paced digital courses that cover both foundational level lessons as well as more advanced instruction.

These AI courses will be available through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are tailored to four major groups – developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business professionals. "Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon," Amazon said in an announcement.

The coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend, notes Dr. Matt Wood, General Manager of Artificial Intelligence, AWS.

These courses include predicting gift wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb. Hence presumably, part of the whole idea is to enhance Amazon’s retail pages, as well as to potentially recruit more people into the company so it can accelerate its own growth.

Finally, in order to help employers hire more efficiently, Amazon also introduces an AWS “machine learning” certification exam, that which can be availed by customers for half the real cost.