Free AI courses from Google
Free short courses on GenAI, LLMs, responsible AI, image generation, encoder-decoder architectures, BERT, attention, transformers, ...
One of my previous employers was a Google Cloud partner, which gave me full and free access to all of Google Cloud’s certification programs, where I took the Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer programs. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that with Google leaning hard into GenAI that they have new certification programs and learning paths, like this Generative AI Leader certification. These certification programs aren’t quick and easy, nor are they free.
Google also offers introductory short courses, most of which are free.1 Here are a few free courses on GenAI, LLMs, responsible AI, image generation, architectures (encoder-decoder, transformers, BERT, attention), and Google’s own Vertex AI studio. Most take under an hour to complete.
Many courses are available in multiple languages. For example, the first intro to GenAI course below is available in English, español, français, עברית, bahasa Indonesia, italiano, 日本語, 한국어, português (Brasil), 简体中文, 繁體中文, polski, українська, Deutsch, and Türkçe.
See the full catalog of >1000 courses at https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/catalog.
Introduction to Generative AI
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/536
Time: 45 minutes
Description: This is an introductory level microlearning course aimed at explaining what Generative AI is, how it is used, and how it differs from traditional machine learning methods. It also covers Google Tools to help you develop your own Gen AI apps.
Introduction to Large Language Models
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/539
Time: 60 minutes
Description: This is an introductory level micro-learning course that explores what large language models (LLM) are, the use cases where they can be utilized, and how you can use prompt tuning to enhance LLM performance. It also covers Google tools to help you develop your own Gen AI apps.
Introduction to Responsible AI
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/554
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This is an introductory-level microlearning course aimed at explaining what responsible AI is, why it's important, and how Google implements responsible AI in their products. It also introduces Google's 7 AI principles.
Introduction to Image Generation
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/541
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This course introduces diffusion models, a family of machine learning models that recently showed promise in the image generation space. Diffusion models draw inspiration from physics, specifically thermodynamics. Within the last few years, diffusion models became popular in both research and industry. Diffusion models underpin many state-of-the-art image generation models and tools on Google Cloud. This course introduces you to the theory behind diffusion models and how to train and deploy them on Vertex AI.
Encoder-Decoder Architecture
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/543
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This course gives you a synopsis of the encoder-decoder architecture, which is a powerful and prevalent machine learning architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. You learn about the main components of the encoder-decoder architecture and how to train and serve these models. In the corresponding lab walkthrough, you’ll code in TensorFlow a simple implementation of the encoder-decoder architecture for poetry generation from the beginning.
Attention Mechanism
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/537
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This course will introduce you to the attention mechanism, a powerful technique that allows neural networks to focus on specific parts of an input sequence. You will learn how attention works, and how it can be used to improve the performance of a variety of machine learning tasks, including machine translation, text summarization, and question answering.
Transformer Models and BERT Model
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/538
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This course introduces you to the Transformer architecture and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. You learn about the main components of the Transformer architecture, such as the self-attention mechanism, and how it is used to build the BERT model. You also learn about the different tasks that BERT can be used for, such as text classification, question answering, and natural language inference.
Create Image Captioning Models
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/542
Time: 30 minutes
Description: This course teaches you how to create an image captioning model by using deep learning. You learn about the different components of an image captioning model, such as the encoder and decoder, and how to train and evaluate your model. By the end of this course, you will be able to create your own image captioning models and use them to generate captions for images
Introduction to Vertex AI Studio
Course: https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/course_templates/552
Time: 2 hours
Description: This course introduces Vertex AI Studio, a tool to interact with generative AI models, prototype business ideas, and launch them into production. Through an immersive use case, engaging lessons, and a hands-on lab, you’ll explore the prompt-to-product lifecycle and learn how to leverage Vertex AI Studio for Gemini multimodal applications, prompt design, prompt engineering, and model tuning. The aim is to enable you to unlock the potential of gen AI in your projects with Vertex AI Studio.
Videos and readings are free in these courses are free, but if the course includes any labs to complete on Google Cloud, you'll have to pay for those. Also, recognize that while these courses aren’t just thinly veiled sales pitches, they will steer you toward using Google Cloud products (just like Amazon’s courses will steer you toward AWS).