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There is no doubt that generative AI has taken the world by storm. While there are issues of reliability and accuracy in tools like ChatGPT, AI chatbots can also provide a substantial productivity benefit to many workers.

Beyond the benefits that come from using generative AI as a tool, there are also opportunities for you to improve your employment situation by developing skills in the generative AI arena.

Also: 6 skills you need to become an AI prompt engineer

Although there are many courses, degree programs, micro degrees (which are not degrees, for the record), and boot camps that will charge you big bucks with the promise of earning big bucks, that's not the only direction you can take. There are also many free resources that can help you expand your skill set.

For example, there is the collection of thirteen free short courses offered by OpenAI (the folks who make ChatGPT) and DeepLearning (an education provider). While DeepLearning does sell longer courses, the thirteen I'm going to spotlight here are a great place to start -- and they are completely free.

I signed up and took the first course, "ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers." It consists of nine short videos of roughly 10 minutes each, along with exercises and a test bench that allows you to try out the code taught in the course and see what it does.

Also: 8 ways to reduce ChatGPT hallucinations

I enjoyed the course and got a lot out of it. It helped me understand how to connect ChatGPT to code and how traditional programmers can include generative AI prompts in their coding kit bags. I did it over the course of a weekend, learned a lot, and spent nothing.

It doesn't get better than that.

Beginner courses

Cours offerings are listed as "beginner" or "intermediate." Keep in mind that beginner refers to your AI development experience, not your technical experience. You need to have a fairly good programming background to really understand the content of these "beginner" level courses.

• ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers:Go beyond the chat box. Use API access to leverage LLMs into your own applications, and learn to build a custom chatbot.
• Building Systems with the ChatGPT API:Level up your use of LLMs. Learn to break down complex tasks, automate workflows, chain LLM calls, and get better outputs.
• LangChain for LLM Application Development:Learn the framework to take LLMs out of the box. Learn to use LangChain to call LLMs into new environments.
• LangChain: Chat with Your Data:Create a chatbot to interface with your private data and documents using LangChain.
• Large Language Models with Semantic Search:Learn to use LLMs to enhance search and summarize results.
• Building Generative AI Applications with Gradio:Create and demo machine learning applications quickly. Share your app with the world on Hugging Face Spaces.
• Pair Programming with a Large Language Model:Learn how to effectively prompt an LLM to help you improve, debug, understand, and document your code.
• Understanding and Applying Text Embeddings:Learn how to accelerate the application development process with text embeddings.
• How Business Thinkers Can Start Building AI Plugins With Semantic Kernel:Learn Microsoft's open-source orchestrator, Semantic Kernel, and develop business applications using LLMs.

Intermediate courses

The following set of courses is considered "intermediate." I'd recommend completing the above nine courses first, then taking on this next set. Remember that they're all free, so your only cost is the time it takes to learn some tasty goodness.

• Functions, Tools and Agents with LangChain:Learn and apply the new capabilities of LLMs as a developer tool.
• Finetuning Large Language Models:Learn to fine-tune an LLM in minutes and specialize it to use your own data.
• Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI Models Using Weights and Biases:Learn MLOps tools for managing, versioning, debugging, and experimenting in your ML workflow.
• How Diffusion Models Work:Learn and build diffusion models from the ground up.

Grow your career without growing your credit card balance

AI is hot, hot, hot. As such, companies and even long-established educational institutions will do everything they can to convince you a career in AI will change your life -- and they're the folks who will help you make that change.

Some of those programs are very good. I taught degree-credit programming courses at the UC Berkeley extension for six years and have been an advisory board member at the university for more than 16 years. Many students have told me these types of formal courses helped them change careers. So I'm not saying to avoid formal courses and for-pay education.

Also: Mid-career professionals, watch out. You're the most exposed to AI

But with the wealth of free material out there, I strongly recommend you take advantage of those resources first, especially if you're on a budget or if you want to get started in this field without making a substantial financial commitment.

What do you think? Are you going to take any of these courses? Have you taken any? What did you learn? Let us know in the comments below.

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Artificial Intelligence

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• AI at the edge: Fast times ahead for 5G and the Internet of Things
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• Worried about AI gobbling up your job? Start doing these 3 things now
• With AI, organizations are now seeing software developers as great collaborators