One of the most recommended starting points for absolute beginners — explains what AI is and what it can and can’t do, with no math or coding. A paid certificate option exists.

OpenAI’s own free learning platform — courses and live sessions from AI fundamentals all the way to building AI agents.

Anthropic’s learning platform (rebranded from Anthropic Academy in 2026): prompt engineering, Claude Code, building AI products, and AI fluency — with free completion certificates.

Free learning platform with an AI Fundamentals path and free digital credentials on completion. Zero cost, entirely browser-based.

Microsoft’s free 24-lesson open-source curriculum: symbolic AI, neural networks, computer vision, and NLP, with quizzes, labs, and sketchnotes. Light coding involved.

Free 21-lesson course on generative AI and LLMs: prompt engineering, building text and image apps, Copilot, AI agents, RAG, and fine-tuning.

Free hands-on micro-courses you run in your browser — Python, Intro to Machine Learning, Prompt Engineering, Intro to AI Agents, and more. Learn by doing.

Google Cloud Skills Boost’s free introductory path: what generative AI is, how LLMs work, and responsible AI. The official on-ramp to Google’s AI certs.

Free short lessons from Andrew Ng’s team — including the flagship ChatGPT Prompt Engineering course — plus agents, RAG, and vector databases. Short and practical.

Google’s free flagship ML course — 12 hours of video, real-world case studies, and hands-on TensorFlow exercises. Needs basic Python and a little algebra.

Harvard’s free intro to AI concepts and algorithms with Python — search, knowledge representation, neural networks, NLP, and hands-on projects. Verified certificate available for a fee.

Free 5-course series that gets you training real neural networks fast, with a top-down, code-first approach. Beginner-friendly in style but moves quickly — best after basic Python.

Google’s beginner course: no programming or prior AI knowledge needed. Covers everyday AI use, prompting, and responsible AI, with a shareable certificate.

Andrew Ng’s famous non-technical course — what AI can and can’t do, spotting AI opportunities, and working in an AI-powered organization. $49 for 180 days of access; free to audit (no certificate on audit).

Subscription platform with 600+ interactive browser-based courses — Understanding Artificial Intelligence, Intro to Python, and full AI career tracks. Learn-by-doing format; the first chapter of courses is free.

The flagship beginner ML program — supervised and unsupervised learning, decision trees, and building models in Python. The standard “serious beginner” path; free to audit.

Perennial bestseller — hands-on Python and R, from regression through deep learning and reinforcement learning, with real datasets. Udemy pricing swings wildly; buy on sale, never at list price.

The follow-on to the ML Specialization — neural networks, CNNs, sequence models, and transformers. The standard “beginner to practitioner” path; free to audit.

Free digital credentials (badges) earned on completion, including the AI Fundamentals path. A no-cost resume signal from a recognized name.

The credential for the Google AI Essentials course above — non-technical and beginner-first. The certificate is the program’s assessments; no separate proctored exam.

Non-technical, business-strategy-focused certification: gen AI fundamentals, Google Cloud offerings, improving model output, and responsible adoption. All official training materials are free — only the exam is paid. No prerequisites.

Covers ML concepts, computer vision, NLP, and generative AI on Azure. No coding required, slightly more technical than Google’s cert. Note: the older AI-900 exam is retired — AI-901 is the current one.

Validates foundational understanding of AI/ML and generative AI on AWS. A solid entry credential if your world runs on Amazon’s cloud.