Thousands Tap Into Apple's Latest Initiative: Free AI Education for Students & Graduates - Discover More on ZDNet

Thousands Tap Into Apple’s Latest Initiative: Free AI Education for Students & Graduates - Discover More on ZDNet

Jason Hiner/ZDNET

The rise of artificial intelligence has made it even more critical for employees to upskill, with a recent Microsoft study showing that 66% of leaders wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills. Apple is trying to address that with its latest initiative.

On Tuesday, Apple announced that it will train thousands of Apple Developer Academy students, mentors, and alumni in “technologies and tools that take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI)” via a new core curriculum.

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The custom-built curriculum will teach learners how to build, train, and deploy machine learning models across Apple’s device ecosystem. Courses span the fundamentals of AI technologies and frameworks, CoreML, and more.

Students will learn through a guided curriculum and project-based assignments, with the assistance of hundreds of mentors and over 12,000 alumni, according to Apple. Starting this fall, Apple will offer the curriculum in 18 Developer Academies in six countries: Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the US.

“At Apple, we see coding as a universal language and believe in empowering developers, creators, and entrepreneurs across the world with tools and technologies that will allow them to create phenomenal experiences,” Susan Prescott, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, said in a statement.

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Students enrolled in the course will also have access to Apple’s latest tools, including Xcode 16, the company’s IDE for creating applications, and Swift Assist, a companion tool for coding tasks in Xcode 16. You can sign up for Apple Developer Academies for free.

This education push follows Apple’s recent announcements at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference, at which the company unveiled Apple Intelligence , its new “personal intelligence” system that infuses generative models throughout the Apple device ecosystem.

Now that Apple is all in on AI, it makes sense for the company to invest more into its developer community and train the next professionals to help carry its AI projects forward.