Google is investing $75 million to teach a million Americans how to use AI

Google announced Friday that it is releasing a course aimed at teaching a million Americans how to use artificial intelligence tools.

As part of the rollout, the tech giant also announced that its charity arm, Google.org, has budgeted $75 million in grants for AI skills training for people in rural and underserved areas.

The new AI skills course will be available for $49 on Coursera, a for-profit online course provider.

The announcement comes after Google scrapped rules requiring suppliers and staffing agencies it works with to offer their workers good wages and benefits, and laid off thousands of workers. staff despite record profits.

According to the course listing, it will teach users how to “use generative AI tools to help develop ideas and content, make more informed decisions, and accelerate everyday work tasks,” and do so responsibly.

The course also promises that students will “develop strategies to stay current in the emerging landscape of AI.”

The $75 million in grants from the AI ​​Opportunity Fund will go to “best-in-class workforce development and education organizations,” a Google spokesperson said.

Organizations like Goodwill Industries International will receive a portion of the training funds “to empower Americans to use AI technology to increase productivity and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.”

Goodwill’s career development programs have been praised in the past for helping employees secure steady employment with livable wages and benefits.

But the organization still pays disabled workers less than the minimum wage, under the guise of job skills training — a program authorized by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Some disabled employees working under this exemption earn less than $1 per hour.

And just a week ago, Google announced that it did reverse his rules that required its business partners to offer their employees a living wage.

Google has rolled out new programs to train employees in AI. Meanwhile, the company continues to fight efforts by federal labor authorities to have Google treat employees fairly.

From 2019 until last week, Google had required the companies it contracted with to pay their workers at least $15 an hour and provide them with health insurance and benefits.

But because Google exercised a degree of control over these workers, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said this made Google a “joint employer” of them.

Therefore, the tech company would have to negotiate with their unions – something the company is notoriously resistant to.

Google has refused to negotiate with unionized workers much closer to home, including YouTube, which the company owns.

When YouTube contractors unanimously joined the Alphabet Workers Union last year and pushed for negotiations with Google over working conditions, the tech giant refused.

Google has regularly suppressed the protected activities of its employees, the National Labor Relations Board has found.

This refusal was contrary to the law, the NLRB ruled in January this year.

These are not isolated incidents either. Google has been accused of illegally firing employees for union activity, disrupting protected activities, and generally engaging in illegal conduct to prevent its employees from exercising their rights to organize for better working conditions. Institute for Economic Policy.

The new charity programs Google announced today also follow high-profile layoffs.

Google reported that it made a profit of $20.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, up 52 percent from the previous year, but its workforce shrank by four percent.

Kenneth Smith, an engineering manager at Google, said management informed him of the job cuts in an email and complained on a LinkedIn page. after that the company “failed to recognize their humanity.”

“I’ve had a lot of anger and frustration with Google leadership over the way they handled the layoffs of twelve thousand people last January,” he wrote, adding, “And I don’t see much evidence that they’ve learned much. from that experience.’

The move came shortly after Google launched its large language model (LLM) called Goose, and after it announced a major investment in AI startup anthropic.

The new AI course is self-paced and includes 10 hours of material spread over five modules.