November 28, 2023
By Bob O'Donnell
Given how quickly technologies like Generative AI have come onto the market, it probably isn’t terribly surprising to discover that in-depth knowledge of how to use these technologies or even how they work is very limited. In fact, as the recent TECHnalysis Research study on GenAI usage in the enterprise highlighted (see “A New Beginning: Generative AI in the Enterprise” for more), the lack of education on the topic is staggeringly high.
As a result, it’s great to see organizations like Amazon and its Amazon Web Services division jumping in to offer new training courses and other tools to help people get up to speed on these critical new technologies. Even better, they’re making these tools freely available, helping to ensure that they reach as wide an audience as possible.
At a corporate level, Amazon recently announced a new training and reskilling initiative it’s calling “AI Ready” that the company hopes will educate 2 million people by the end of 2025 on how to get a job in the red-hot GenAI field. The program consists of a set of 8 free training courses aimed at several different audiences including business decision makers and those interested in learning critical GenAI programming skills. In addition, in partnership with training company Udacity, Amazon is sponsoring $12 million worth of scholarships for 50,000 high-school age students from underserved and underrepresented communities through its AWS Generative AI Scholarship program. Finally, for even younger students, Amazon is also working with Code.org for a 60-minute class entitled “Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition” where students from kindergarten through 12th grade will work to create a virtual music video set using GenAI tools.
A few days earlier, AWS unveiled an interactive online AI app building tool called PartyRock. Based on the company’s own Bedrock AI platform and Titan Large Language Models (LLMs), the clever PartyRock is described by Amazon as an AI playground. It helps even non-programmers build their own simple GenAI-powered mini apps using a wizard-like interface and pre-built templates. For example, you can use PartyRock to create a customized tour guide creation tool, cartoon animal illustrator, clever email response generator, and much more with just a few clicks.
Those with little or no programming experience can leverage some pre-built templates to make the process easier, while those with some programming experience can start from scratch and build relatively sophisticated tools by linking together a number of pre-built modules and customizing the types of output that each one generates.
In the process of using the tool, PartyRock helps people at multiple levels of technical expertise better understand how GenAI technology works and how it can be deployed. It also manages to somewhat demystify GenAI and help make it more approachable. By seeing how these mini applications are built, you definitely get a better understanding of how the technology works (and, frankly, how many applications are constructed).
The fears around potential job loss that GenAI has triggered in many people makes these tools even more valuable than other types of training options that tech companies have offered for years. There are serious—and valid—concerns about the impact that GenAI could have on certain roles, so it’s great to see these kinds of efforts from Amazon.
Reskilling and retraining in the era of AI is undoubtedly going to be a big issue, and I expect many more tech companies to create these and other kinds of programs to help both those who are already employed in the tech industry and others who may be interested in joining. There’s little doubt that the next few years are going to lead to some fairly dramatic shifts in the workplace, in the types of jobs that become available, and quite frankly, the kinds of jobs that could disappear. What’s particularly important about something like PartyRock and Amazon’s other training programs is that they can open up new opportunities for those who don’t have traditional degrees and bring a whole new group of workers into the tech world. Given the issues around bias and other related concerns that have already popped up in early iterations of GenAI-powered tools, that’s definitely an important step in the right direction.
Here's a link to the original column: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4654518-aws-introduces-ai-training-tools-guide-users Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech. |
