How are folks affordably self-training in AI?

7 points·macartain··9 comments

I am an engineer at a small organisation - there is no question of budget being available to buy us accounts with any of the major model providers. How are other folks in my position managing to keep their AI integration skills up to speed? Most free or low-budget courses I see online - e.g. at DeepLearning - seem to assume a paid account. At the moment i cannot justify that outlay.

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Claude academy has some courses for free and couple certifications too. Otherwise, I found the best way for me to learn is by doing. So I just use oss models through ollama as part of my workflow to keep costs in check. Local models on consumer electronics are much more capable than you might think!

Good shout - particularly for learning, I assume, rather than getting the most productive reply from a SOTA model.

try anthropic skilljar courses - excellent value - totally free - cert included

I accept you have to invest in your skills occasionally, but there are so many providers to choose from. Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions - I am now looking into these.

The good news news is the core skils compound.Once you understand pipeline,promoting patterns,and evaluation,switching providers becomes much easier.

Did you try looking into openrouter?. They offer some models for free or low cost.

sometimes you have to take on debt to learn things

i've moved away from this thinking over the last decade. started to question anything that leads to taking debt. anthropic skilljar courses are excellent and they give a cert at the end of it. good to add to linkedin.

I could accept an argument that sometimes it may be the right move to take on (reasonable) debt, but I doubt you’ll find a single instance where you _have_ to do it.

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