I went in sceptical, because a free learning platform run by the company selling the product can easily turn into a long advertisement, and came away pleasantly surprised. OpenAI Academy is a real resource, not a funnel. Everything I touched was free, there was no checkout page hiding two clicks deep, and the production quality is high. The strongest thing it has going for it is currency.
These tools change every few weeks, and most third-party courses are quietly out of date the moment they publish, whereas the people making the material here are the same people shipping the features, so the prompting advice and the workflow demos actually match what the product does today. The range is wide too. There is genuinely beginner material for someone who has never typed a prompt, alongside more technical content aimed at developers building on the API, and a lot of practical middle ground for teachers, small business owners and office workers who just want to get more done. Where you have to set your expectations correctly is structure.
This is a library, not a course. There is no single path that takes you from lesson one to a finish line with a tidy certificate at the end, and the depth swings noticeably from one video to the next, with some pieces feeling like a quick teaser and others going properly deep. You also have to accept the obvious bias, which is that the whole thing revolves around OpenAI's own products, so you will learn ChatGPT and the OpenAI API extremely well and hear comparatively little about the rest of the landscape. And because nothing tests you, it is entirely possible to watch hours of it and retain almost nothing unless you stop and actually do the thing in your own account.
My honest recommendation is to treat it as the first stop, not the only one. Before anyone spends real money on a paid AI course, they should spend a week here, follow along with their own tasks rather than just watching, and only then decide whether they still have a gap worth paying to fill. For a lot of people, especially non-technical professionals, this free material will already cover most of what they actually needed.