Preparing for the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) Exam

Preparing for the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam? These are the essential links, study materials, and exam tips to help you get certified.

Official Certification Links

• Certification home page
• Exam guide
• 4-step prep resources

Major Categories of Exam Topics

Machine Learning Basics

• Types of machine learning problems (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, classification, regression, etc.) (YouTube video)
  • Labeled data vs. unlabeled data and what kinds of problems require which
• The machine learning lifecycle (framing the problem, data processing, model development, model training, deployment/inference, monitoring)
• Ways to score/evaluate model performance (accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, BERTScore, ROUGE, BLEU, etc.)

Generative AI Basics

• Differences between generative AI and traditional ML/AI
• Fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. domain tuning (YouTube video for Fine-tuning vs. RAG)
• Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)
• Prompt engineering (zero-shot, few-shot, parameter tuning with things like temperature, Top P, injection attacks, etc.)
• Vector embeddings and the OpenSearch Service (see Lex/Bedrock video, How Vector Embeddings Work)
• General concepts around least effort, lowest operational overhead, lowest cost, etc.
• Responsible AI

SageMaker

• Important! Know all the core features/capabilities: Data Wrangler, Feature Store, Clarify, JumpStart, Model Monitor, Ground Truth, SageMaker Canvas, SageMaker Studio Lab [free], etc.
  • (Note: Some of the SageMaker videos are slightly outdated 🙂)
  • Review a high-level explanation of SageMaker and recent changes

AWS AI and ML Services

• Know all the major AI/ML services and their use cases
  • Rekognition, Lex, Polly, Textract, Transcribe, Comprehend, Augmented AI (A2I)
  • Pay special attention to Bedrock and foundational models

Other Core AWS Services

• Have a foundational understanding of core services and how they can interact with the AI/ML services
  • IAM
  • EC2
  • RDS / DynamoDB
  • VPC
  • S3
  • CloudTrail
  • Macie
  • QuickSight

How to Study

If you're a total newbie

• Follow the AWS 4-step plan
• Many resources are free and don't require a subscription
• Do practice questions and practice exam to gauge how you're doing (all questions have full explanations and additional links)
• Check out courses on other platforms too

If you have ML/AI experience on AWS

• Do practice questions and practice exam to identify where you have gaps, then study for those
• Skip around AWS courses as needed, and check out content on other platforms too

Exam Tips

• Read the questions carefully
  • Look for qualifier phrases such as "least expensive," or "with the least amount of effort"
  • There may be more than one correct answer
• You can usually eliminate two answers right away because they don't make sense ("the distractors")
• Correct answers:
  • Are usually simple
  • Usually involve an AWS managed service
• Make your first pass through all questions, answering things you're sure of
  • Flag the others to come back to
  • Make a second pass on all questions if you have time
  • Sometimes a question later in the exam will help you remember an earlier answer
• Never leave a question unanswered
  • It will automatically be marked wrong
  • Guessing at least gives you a chance
• Take the official practice questions and practice exam

Practice Questions

• AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) Practice Questions