Amazon yesterday opened up its internal machine learning courses to developers and aspiring data scientists all over the world. The e-commerce giant had faced media ire recently over protests in Germany, Spain and France, where employees walked out over work compensation and other issues. The open sourcing of their internal ML course may bring Amazon some positive energy, especially in the tech industry.

Google had also recently introduced an impressive ML crash course with Tensorflow APIs which was supposed to be their fast-paced, practical introduction to ML. This course came as a great resource for engineers all over the world and was an instant hit. Google’s Zuri Kemp said, “…That’s why part of Google AI’s mission is to help anyone interested in ML succeed — from researchers to developers and companies, to students.”

Amazon AWS General Manager of Artificial Intelligence, Dr Matt Wood said, “Today, I’m excited to share that, for the first time, the same ML courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now available to all developers through AWS.” He emphasised the fact that Amazon has been using ML in their products for more than two decades.

Amazon has thousands of engineers and data scientists leveraging ML for various products that are really important for their business. One of the main applications of these open courses can be to easily train software engineers with a non-data science and ML backgrounds from smaller companies. Usually, smaller companies do not have the budget or the time flexibility to send their engineers to attend paid ML courses.

Amazon, as well as AWS, have used ML to improve retail pages, products, fulfilment technologies and connected AI. They also have a slew of helper tools for developers like, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Lex.

The ML course offered by Amazon has 45 hours of training and 30 different courses that can help a wide range of practitioners like data engineers, data scientists, engineers and data analysts. This course along with Google’s course is a special value addition for AWS and Google Cloud customers who are used to working in the respective cloud environments.