Good news! Amazon says its machine learning courses are now free

We’ve had good news this week: Amazon says its machine learning courses are now free for everyone.

Previously, this program was available for Amazon employees only. Now anyone can join in at no charge. You’d need to sign up to Amazon Web Services’ free plan. There’s about 30 courses in total, with over 45 hours of course material, videos, and lab tests.

According to Amazon, the program’s content is for anybody at all, from beginners to advanced developers. Though, the courses are free, you would have to pay for cloud services you’d use for lab testing.

The program also includes an “AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty” certification exam, which costs $300 (roughly GH₵1500). But, the price of the certification exam is currently discounted by 50% – down to $150 (₵750).

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Amazon is targeting four groups with this program: developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business professionals. Amazon said the course starts with fundamental concepts, and builds on those through real-world examples.

“Some of the examples include predicting gift wrapping eligibility for products in a store, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb’s database of information about movies”, TNW reports.

Amazon isn’t in this alone. Microsoft also has a similar paid program to train developers on the topic. Google also recently partnered with Coursera to launch a free crash course and a paid specialization course on machine learning.

You can check out all of Amazon’s machine learning courses.