Free AI for Beginners Course

If you’re looking for a free introductory AI course for beginner’s, Microsoft has got you covered.

The aptly-named Artificial Intelligence for Beginners is put together by Microsoft Azure Cloud Advocates, and consists of a 12 week, 24 lesson curriculum designed to introduce learners to the wonderful world of AI.

This curriculum will introduce learners to a variety of AI concepts, including, but not limited to:

• « Classical » GOFAI (good old fashion AI) approaches to AI, from symbolic approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning
• Modern approaches to AI, the backbone to which are neural networks and they deep learning techniques they allow
• Implementation of modern AI topics using TensorFlow and PyTorch
• Neural network architectures for images and text
• Alternative AI methods, including genetic algorithms and multi-agent systems

You can see specific course content, laid out lesson by lesson, here.

Lessons are taught using a variety of materials. Some of the common resources leveraged in lessons include:

• Pre-reading introductory materials, specific to the course lesson; here’s an example for Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Systems
• Instructive Jupyter notebooks, specific to PyTorch or TensorFlow, generally one for each framework per lesson
• Labs, which are assignments to be performed by learners, and which are Jupyter notebooks to be completed
• Occasional links to Microsfot Learn modules for related topics; Microsoft Learn provides access to GPU-enabled environments

You can find a mind map of the course here.