OpenAI Academy Courses Are Open and FREE!
OpenAI opened the one and only OpenAI academy. It’s free, yes, free, and anyone can join and take and take their courses.
When did OpenAI Academy Open?
Technically, the OpenAI academy opened in September 2024. They made it public after a brief and not too shiny LinkedIn post:
But the best part is that now it’s populated with plenty of courses that anyone can take, and they even have specific modules for K12! It’s not tailored only to techy people that like to code in Python and use PyTorch and Tensorflow for their jobs.
The general idea of democratizing the use of large language models (LLMs) is solid. I personally think that there is a lot of misinformation about AI, LLMs, about what they can and cannot do. That’s also one of the reasons I like writing this blog :). I like seeing this as Altman’s give-back effort, where OpenAI consciously tries to close the gap between myth and reality about AI.
What Courses Are Available at the OpenAI Academy?
Disclaimer: I haven’t taken yet any of the courses that the OpenAI academy offers.
However, I spent some time looking at what topics are available, and the first thing you notice is that they are organized in Collections.
OpenAI Academy Collection – ChatGPT on Campus
The ChatGPT on Campus collection has 6 main sections, designed to target mostly college students:
- Introduction to ChatGPT Edu: Your AI-Powered Academic Companion
- Mastering Prompts: The Key to Getting What You Need from ChatGPT
- AI for Academic Success: Research, Writing, and Studying Made Easier
- Organization and Automation: Managing Time and Tasks with AI
- AI Career Prep: Resumes and Interviews
- Collaborating with AI: Group Work and Projects Simplified
OpenAI Academy Collection – ChatGPT at Work
The seven sections in this collection are a good introduction to how ChatGPT, and other LLMs, work. It touches on data analysis with ChatGPT, which can be tricky, but also gets to some more advanced prompt engineering topics:
- Multimodality Explained
- Introduction to Prompt Engineering
- ChatGPT Search
- OpenAI, LLMs & ChatGPT
- Introduction to GPTs
- ChatGPT for Data Analysis
- Advanced Prompt Engineering
OpenAI Academy Collection – Sora Tutorials
Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard of Sora, the AI tool from OpenAI that allows you to make pretty cool videos using text prompts. Want to learn how to use Sora? This collection may be what you need:
- Getting Started with Sora
- How to storyboard with Sora
- How to recut with Sora
- How to blend videos with Sora
- How to remix with Sora
- How to loop with Sora
OpenAI Academy Collection – AI for K-12 Educators
Here we get into the section tailored for K-12 educators. How do you safely implement AI in the classroom? How do you explain how AI works? Do teachers, especially those who teach non-techy topics, know how LLMs work or how to use them? My wife is a teacher..and no, she’s not techy at all….
- Intro to AI for K-12 Educators
- The AI Educator Brain on Prompting: Mastering the Art of AI Responses in the Classroom
- ChatGPT and Beyond: How to Handle AI in Schools
- Practical Tips for Teachers to Use AI
- ChatGPT Foundations for K-12 Educators
OpenAI Academy Collection Developer Build Hours
If you are a coder, or a really techy person who knows better the ins and outs of LLMs and ChatGPT, this section is for you. Here they address deeper topics like function calling, fine tuning and reasoning.
- Enhancing Recommendations with LLMs Build Hour
- Function Calling Build Hour
- Fine-Tuning Build Hour
- Assistants & Agents Build Hour
- GPT-4o mini Fine-Tuning Build Hour
- Structured Outputs Build Hour
- Realtime Build Hour
- Evals Build Hour
- Reasoning with o1 Build Hour
- Distillation Build Hour
What Do I Think About the OpenAI Academy?
OpenAI is definitely not the first one to offer free AI courses. Google, IBM, NVIDIA, and just about a million people on YouTube can teach you a lot about AI, LLMs, machine learning, and anything related to it.
I like that here OpenAI offers a very well-structured system aimed at helping not just the individual person, but schools and institutions. Eventually, I believe that even if this is all free, it’s all going to offer good returns. When people, schools, and teachers learn more about LLMs, they will become more regular users. When they become regular users, they will start using it more. When they start using it more, they will need to subscribe to overcome the limitations of free-tiers. Or, the data collected by an increased use of LLMs, will become training material for OpenAI, which is still an advantage.
Last but not least, releasing free courses makes OpenAI look good. I like free educational resources…and yes, who doesn’t love a good old student loan…? I don’t…
What do you think? Let me know, or read more about other AI topics!
