In a blog post written by Swami Sivasubramanian, vice-president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company said that it wanted to reduce barriers to learning AI for adults and young learners.

The project, called AI Ready, includes eight free and newly created AI and generative AI courses, as well as an AWS generative AI scholarship for 50,000 high school and university students.

The scholarship, which is being launched in partnership with Udacity, is worth $12m, according to Amazon.

Amazon has also partnered with Code.org on a project to help students learn about generative AI.

Amazon’s AI Ready project is in addition to AWS’s commitment to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people by 2025.

Sivasubramanian wrote: “AI is the most transformative technology of our generation. If we are going to unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world’s most challenging problems, we need to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn.

“That’s why Amazon is announcing AI Ready, a new commitment designed to provide free AI skills training to two million people globally by 2025. To achieve this goal, we’re launching new initiatives for adults and young learners, and scaling our existing free AI training programmes – removing cost as a barrier to accessing these critical skills.”