Free AI Courses from Google & Harvard to Start Learning Today

AI is not just a buzzword but a reality. It is like learning about computers in the early 2000s. And, while the fear is real about AI taking over many things, we are far from that. But, you shouldn’t take it for granted and start learning to be ready to strengthen your skills.

The good news is, you don’t have to spend a fortune to learn AI. Leading institutions and organizations like Google, Harvard, Coursera, IBM, Nvidia have many high-quality free courses.

Free AI Courses for Beginners

First, let me share beginner-friendly AI courses. These online courses are for someone who has a basic understanding of computers and the Internet but new to AI.

Elements of AI

Start with an introduction to AI. Once you have basic understanding, try your knowledge to build with AI. The introduction AI course covers essential topics like:

• What AI is
• How AI solves problems
• Real work example usage of AI
• What is machine learning
• How neural networks works
• AI implications

And, in building AI, you will learn little advanced topics like probability, ML neighbor method, deep learning and ideas to implement AI.

Google

Good has released many AI training, available through Coursera, YouTube and other platforms. It can be confusing which one to pick, and I am here to help you pick the best ones.

Start with Google AI Essentials Specialization which will last for a month when you spend 1 hour, weekly. You are expected to learn the basics of AI, its capabilities, becoming productive using AI and how to use it responsibly.

When you gain basic knowledge, you would like to learn about prompting. I would recommend the Google Prompting Essentials Specialization course available on Coursera. It is a month-long course (1 hour every week). In this, you’ll learn how to start good prompts to get better results, automate your everyday work using effective prompts.

DeepLearning.AI

Learn from Andrew Ng. AI for Everyone is an approx 6 hours course and one of the highly rated on Coursera. It teaches the foundation of AI, building AI projects, the role of AI in company and society.

English is not your primary language? Not a problem, you can hear the course audio in 31 languages, including French, Spanish, and Deutsch. And, if you fancy sharing your learning milestone on LinkedIn, you get a certificate upon course completion.

OpenAI Academy

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has launched an academy recently, and it is a great way to learn ChatGPT from basic to advanced. Some of the courses I like and found useful:

• Building custom GPTs to automate tasks
• Mastering prompts
• Deep research
• Building RAG with OpenAI API
• Building AI agents

Anthropic Academy

The Claude AI model is getting popular, and it makes sense to learn from the creator itself. You’ll learn how to use Claude and its tools. There are some practical guides like using Vision, interacting with computer desktops, building RAG and more.

• Generative AI Learning by Google - learn about generative AI, large language models and designing prompts in Vertex AI. This course is managed by Google Cloud and highly geared towards Google Cloud Platform use.
• Artificial Intelligence for Beginners by Microsoft - very detailed curriculum for students who want to learn the concept in detail. You should also check the Microsoft AI learning hub.
• Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT - a good coverage teaching how to create complex prompts for business applications, using prompt patterns and more. The course by Vanderbilt University is taught in English but available in different languages with AI translation.
• AI Introduction with Python - Harvard University is giving this for free. But if you need a verifiable certificate, you need to pay $299. This is recommended to Python developers who are interested in learning AI principles, reinforcement learning, graph search algorithms, and more.
• Generative AI Explained by Nvidia - an overview of generative AI concepts, its challenges and opportunities.
• Learn from MIT - 15 + courses from introduction to machine vision.
• Great Learning - plenty of foundation courses to learn TensorFlow, image processing, chatbot creation, etc.

Free AI Courses for Intermediate & Advanced Level

After gaining the foundation knowledge, you should move towards advanced knowledge to solve business problems and build full-fledged AI apps. I’ve listed the following free AI courses to build AI agents, Chatbots, RAG systems and more.

Building RAG by Nvidia

I liked these two Nvidia courses for building RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). 

The first one is an introduction to RAG, which gives you a basic understanding about RAG and the ingestion and retrieval process.

After understanding what RAG is, you can go for how to build RAG agents with LLM. This covers building LLM pipelines using LangChain, knowledge extraction, embeddings, using vector storage and generating responses.

AI Agents in LangGraph

Taught by Harrison Chase and Rotem Weiss, in less than 2 hours, you will learn to build AI agents using LangGraph. By the end of the course, you should have fair knowledge of:

• Building an agent using LangGraph.
• How LanGraph works.
• Retrieving answers in a predictable format.
• Managing conversation state.
• Adding humans in the loop.
• Building an agent to write essays.

It includes code examples as well.

Applications of TinyML by Harvard

This is a 6-week course taught in English, but transcripts are available in Hindi, Bahasa, Español, Deutsch and other languages. You’ll learn TinyML in real-world applications, anomaly detection, keyword spotting, dataset engineering.

You should have a basic idea about Python, Colab and ML as a prerequisite for this course.

Another one by Harvard is ML and AI with Python - this is recommended to developers and data scientists to learn how to train models, refine ML results, prevent biasness and more.

That’s the end, and I wish you happy AI learning.