10 Free Generative AI Courses Offered by Google

Want to learn more about Generative AI? Google has you covered with their recent announcement of ten free courses! Come along and take a quick tour of these amazing courses that can build your capacity for using artificial intelligence. These are a part of the Generative AI Learning Path offered in Google Cloud Skills Boost.

Why Learn About Generative AI?

Many educators are moving fast to learn about AI. They’re asking critical questions, such as:

• How can AI streamline my workload for lesson planning, grading, and content creation?
• How can I create images and pictures with AI?
• How can I model the responsible use of AI for my students?
• What are some concrete prompts I can use with AI?

And, of course, there are more fascinating questions to consider. Google offers its courses as a way to address core questions such as:

• What is Generative AI?
• How could I use it?
• How is it different from what is available now?
• What are Large Language Models (LLMs)?
• What is the importance of responsible AI, and how is Google using it in its tools?

Google’s Available Courses

Google’s AI courses are microlearning courses. Their goal is to get you familiar with the content, and once you complete the course, you get a digital completion badge.

You can find a list of Google’s courses below, along with a link to each:

• Introduction to Generative AI. Get an explanation of what Generative AI is, how it is used, and explore the Google Tools you can use to develop your own Gen AI apps. It also discusses how this AI differs from traditional machine learning methods.
• Introduction to Large Language Models (LMM). Explore what LLMs are, how you can use them, how you can tweak prompts, and how to enhance their performance.
• Introduction to Responsible AI. Earn a completion badge on the topics of responsible AI and how Google implements AI. The focus is on Google’s seven AI principles and tools.
• Generative AI Fundamentals. Complete the Generative AI, LMM, and Responsible AI courses and pass a quiz to earn this Generative AI Fundamentals skill badge.
• Introduction to Image Generation. Focusing on diffusion models for generating images, this course provides an introduction. You learn about the theory behind the models and how to train and deploy them on Vertex AI.
• Encoder-Decoder Architecture. This course provides an overview of machine learning architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks. This includes text summarization, question answering, and more.
• Attention Mechanism. This course introduces you to a technique that allows neural networks. These networks focus on specific parts of an input sequence to improve performance.
• Transformer Models and BERT Model. You will learn what these terms mean, their main components, and what tasks you can complete with them.
• Create Image Captioning Models. When you finish this course, you’ll know the basic components of an image captioning model, how to create one, and how to generate captions using it.
• Introduction to Generative AI Studio. You’ll become familiar with this Vertex AI tool, how it works, and you’ll explore it.

That’s a quick bird’s eye view of the courses. Are you ready to dive head-first into the world of Google’s AI? You will have to watch a few videos, explore links, and take quizzes throughout the courses.

What Should I Know?

To take advantage of these courses, you will probably need to know:

• Python
• Machine learning background

With that in mind, build some background knowledge in these areas before enrolling. Be sure to give these courses a try and get your feet wet if you have these prerequisites under your belt!