Google is offering free AI courses: 7 micro-learning courses under an hour

Indian Express

7 hours ago

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking over industries. The fear of job displacements is palpable; however, as companies around the world are scrambling to automate various processes, professionals too can have an edge by staying updated.
The tech industry is currently in a transition with companies of all sizes across the world deploying AI technologies. And the only way to stay relevant in such volatile times is to upskill oneself. Even though many jobs are being taken over by AI technologies, nothing is lost; there are still numerous new roles that are being created.
If you are planning to upskill yourself, then there is no place better than the Internet. There are thousands of free courses that can equip you with the necessary skills that can make a mark on your resume. Here is a compilation of some of the free AI courses offered by Google.
An LLM is an AI system that has been trained on vast amounts of datasets to come up with human-like text responses. ChatGPT is an example of an LLM. While many are aware of what all ChatGPT can do, not many may have the know-how of the inner workings of an LLM. This is an introductory course that gives insights into what LLMs are, their use cases, and how one can use prompt tuning to improve LLM performance. The course covers Google tools that can help you develop your own Gen AI apps. If you are simply looking to get the basics and build some Gen AI apps, this is the course for you.
Ever wondered how an AI model generates an image? Well, if you need to satiate your curiosity, this short course will introduce you to diffusion models, which are a family of machine learning models that have been powering the AI image generation models. The course introduces you to the theory side of diffusion models and how to train them and deploy them on Vertex AI, Google's unified platform to build ML and AI models. The course also offers a shareable badge upon completion which can enhance your professional profile eventually leading to enhanced career opportunities.
This is a 30-minute course that offers a synopsis of the encoder-decoder architecture, a machine learning architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks. These tasks are mainly machine translation, text summarisation, and question answering. Students will get a chance to understand the main components of this architecture and know how to train and serve these models. Besides, they will also get to code in TensorFlow, Google's open-source software library for ML and deep learning applications. Upon completion, learners will get a shareable badge to prove the user's proficiency.
If you are new to generative AI, this can be a great introduction. This is a microlearning course that explains what generative AI is, how it is used, and what distinguishes it from traditional ML models. The course covers several Google Tools to help one to develop their own Gen AI apps. The course that spans around 45 minutes offers shareable badges after completion. The badge can be viewed on a user's profile and can be even shared with their social network.
Attention mechanism is a technique in deep learning that allows AI models to focus on specific or most relevant parts of their inputs while processing information, instead of treating all parts equally. This 45-minute course offers insights into this powerful technique that allows neural networks to focus on relevant parts of an input sequence. Students will get to know how attention works, and how it can be used to improve the performance of a variety of machine learning tasks including text summarisation, machine translation, question answering, etc. The course also offers shareable badges.
This course offers an introduction to Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) model and transformer architecture. Learners will get to know how the self-attention mechanism works and how it powers BERT models. The course also teaches how BERT can be used for tasks such as question answering, text classification, and natural language interface. The course will likely take about 45 minutes to complete, and it also comes with a shareable skills badge.
This 30-minute-long course will teach learners how to create an image captioning model by using deep learning. The course covers different components of an image captioning model, such as encoder and decoder, and even how to train and evaluate a model. Google claims that by the end of this course, a user will be able to create their own image captioning models and use them to generate captions for images. This course comes with a shareable badge.
These micro-learning courses offered by Google are a combination of video tutorials and quizzes that aim to educate the learners on some of the most crucial aspects of AI. It needs to be noted that when enrolling, most of these courses allow users to consume study materials like videos and documents for free. However, if any of the courses consist of labs, learners are advised to purchase individual subscriptions or credits to make the most of the labs. To get the badge, learners would have to complete all required activities in a course.
Bijin Jose, an Assistant Editor at Indian Express Online in New Delhi, is a technology journalist with a portfolio spanning various prestigious publications. Starting as a citizen journalist with The Times of India in 2013, he transitioned through roles at India Today Digital and The Economic Times, before finding his niche at The Indian Express. With a BA in English from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and an MA in English Literature, Bijin's expertise extends from crime reporting to cultural features. With a keen interest in closely covering developments in artificial intelligence, Bijin provides nuanced perspectives on its implications for society and beyond. ... Read More