Amazon announced last week that it has made available, for free, the same machine learning courses that it uses to train its own engineers. More than 45 hours across 30 different courses are now available to developers, data scientists, data platform engineers and business professionals for gratis.
Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some of the problems that Amazon has had to solve over the years. These include predicting gift-wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from Amazon subsidiary, IMDb.
The coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of Amazon Web Services (AWS) machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend.
The company says that in order to help employers hire more efficiently, it is also introducing its own machine-learning certification that customers can take right now for half price.
The gratis is probably in part to enhance Amazon’s retail pages, as well as to potentially recruit more people into the company so it can accelerate its own growth. If Amazon earns some much-needed goodwill along the way, so be it.