Amazon's DeepRacer Is The AI Racecar Of The Future

Who among us is truly excited about AI racecars? Well, maybe it's something that'll grow on you - at least, Amazon certainly seems to think so, as at they launched the DeepRacer self-driving artificial intelligence (AI) race car during the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. It's a shoebox sized machine, but a racing league for these vehicles is expected to start next year.

These shoebox sized vehicles aren't the main focus for Amazon in terms of AI applications, but are rather just one of many ways AI can be implemented in everyday life. It's also a very accessible form of AI, as prior to this you would need some pretty serious machinery to both create and execute AI systems.

Amazon is planning fo 20 races of the DeepRacer League, which will coincide with their AWS (Amazon Web Services) summits, where winners will have credits that count towards tickets for the next AWS re:Invent conference. The DeepRacer runs on a cloud environment which is used for reinforced learning by each individual car. Amazon SageMaker was the platform on which this environment was built, being a cheap way to build, train, and deploy machines in production-ready hosted environments.

What does all of this mean in layman terms? Amazon's selling small robotic race cars that will have self learning capabilities, operating on one of their cloud-based platforms that is available for a fraction of the cost of other systems. It's the MSF Saga Cup of AI race cars. AWS now controls 51.8 percent of the global market in cloud computing, beating its rival Microsoft, which controls a little over 13 percent.

The DeepRacer can be pre-ordered on Amazon for the low, low price of USD 249, and will go on sale for a full price of USD 399. For universities or just tinkerers with a knack for coding, this is your chance to get in on the world of AI racing before it blows up in scale - if it ever does.