Amazon’s AI is Not Ready.
Amazon recently announced their ‘AI Ready’ initiative, which aims to: “provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025”.
There are three core components to Amazon’s plan:
- 8 new AI and Generative AI courses.
- A generative AI scholarship– providing 50,000 high school and university students access to a Udacity course about generative AI.
- A Collaboration with Code.org to help students learn about generative AI.
Amazon’s new courses are designed to “support professionals in the workplace, open to anyone and aligned to in-demand jobs.”
Allegedly, there is something for everyone, with courses ranging from basic to advanced for tech and leadership roles.
We investigated one of the courses, Amazon’s– “Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence,” which promises to introduce generative AI, vital concepts, and applications to see if it is worth your time.
The Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence Course
Registering for the course
To register for the course, you must create an “AWS Educate” account, available here.
You then need to go through the process of verifying your email and setting up a new password.
Once you have your login details, you can view the AWS Educate platform itself and view your customized “learner dashboard,” you can scroll down to enroll in the courses you need:
Navigating the course
When you select the course, you are greeted with a brief outline:
- A pre-course survey
- The Course material
- A final assessment
- End-of-course feedback survey
We got straight into the course material for this review, but we are confident Amazon would find it helpful if you provided your perspectives on their training.
When you launch the course, you open up the training in a new browser window,
The course content is presented as a slide deck with a voice-over, text version of the course transcript, and graphical animations. Think– Jazzed-up PowerPoint.
There are no questions to complete at the end of each section, but there is a final exam.
Sadly, Amazon selected a robotic-sounding voiceover for the slide content. Still, you can work through the course at your own pace by selecting content headings on the left or replaying the automated slides.
Our Verdict
Amazon estimated the completion time of the course to be 45 minutes– it took us around 15 minutes to reach the end of the content.
There is no point sugar-coating anything; this is one of the worst online courses we have reviewed.
The content ranged from ultra-basic to overly complex, with no attempt to explain specific concepts. It made us wonder if Amazon designed the course for AI rather than human comprehension.
At one point, a graphic compared traditional Machine Learning models and Generative AI. The voiceover explained: “Foundation models can also be customized to provide domain-specific functions that are differentiating to their businesses.”…what does that even mean?
And how about this little gem:
“Prompt engineering begins with a prompt”…
The content feels like it was written by an early version of ChatGPT tasked to pick random, technical-sounding words from the dictionary and spew them onto the screen.
Amazon couldn’t even be bothered to hire a voice actor or teacher – perhaps they thought they would be clever or ironic in using AI to deliver the content – whatever the reason, its stuttering, bland, and unemotional delivery just doesn’t work.
The course starts badly and then gets worse towards the end.
The last few sections are an advertisement for Amazon’s services, and it leads us to wonder if this wasn’t the real reason for providing this course– i.e., the educational content was rushed and only meant as a thin veneer on top of a marketing ploy to sell Amazon’s AI services.
This is reinforced in question three of the final exam, which quizzes you on Amazon’s products instead of your knowledge of generative AI.
We struggled to find anything positive to say about the course. I mean, the graphics are ok?
Would we recommend it?
In a word. No.
This poorly constructed course, with dull and confusing content and an awful voice-over, feels like a poorly built marketing pitch for Amazon’s AI services.
If this course is representative of the other seven generative AI courses Amazon provides under the ‘AI Ready’ banner– we would argue the population’s readiness is much further off than Amazon’s stated 2025 objective…
Final Score?
2/10 (for the graphics…)
Avoid.