Microsoft start AI School to teach Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

The race for cloud supremacy is getting interesting with every passing day. The three major competitors - Amazon, Google and Microsoft seem to be coming up with fresh and innovative ideas to attract customers, making them try and adopt their cloud offerings. The most recent dice was thrown by Google - when they announced their free Big Data and Machine Learning training courses for the Google Cloud Platform. These courses allowed the students to build intelligent models on the Google cloud using the cloud-powered resources. Microsoft have now followed suit with their own AI School - the promise of which is quite similar: Allowing professionals to build smart solutions for their businesses using the Microsoft AI platform on Azure.

AI School: Offering custom learning paths to master Artificial Intelligence

Everyone has a different style and pace of learning. Keeping this in mind, Microsoft have segregated their learning material into different levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced. This helps the intermediate and advanced learners pick up the relevant topics they want to skill up in, without having to compulsorily go through the basics - yet giving them the option to do so in case they’re interested.

The topic coverage in the AI School is quite interesting as well - from introduction to deep learning and Artificial Intelligence to building custom conversational AI. In the process, the students will be using a myriad of tools such as Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot framework for pre-trained AI models, Azure Machine Learning for deep learning and machine learning capabilities as well as Visual Studio and Cognitive Toolkit. The students will have the option of working with their favourite programming language as well - from Java, C# and Node.js to Python and JavaScript.

The end goal of this program, as Microsoft puts it perfectly, is to empower the developers to use the trending Artificial Intelligence capabilities within their existing applications to make them smarter and more intuitive. All this while leveraging the power of the Microsoft cloud.

Google and Microsoft have stepped up, time for Amazon now?

Although Amazon does provide training and certifications for Machine Learning and AI, they are yet to launch their own courses to encourage learners to learn these trending technologies from scratch, and adopt AWS to build their own intelligent models. Considering they dominate the cloud market with almost 2/3rds of the market share, this is quite surprising.

Another interesting point to note here is that Microsoft and Google have both taken significant steps to contribute to open source and free learning. While Google-acquired Kaggle is a great platform to host machine learning competitions and thereby learn new, interesting things in the AI space, Microsoft’s recent acquisition of GitHub takes them in the similar direction of promoting the open source culture and sharing free knowledge.

Is Amazon waiting for a similar acquisition before they take this step in promoting open source learning? We will have to wait and see.