Celebrating the final AWS DeepRacer League championship and road ahead

The AWS DeepRacer League is the world’s first autonomous racing league, open to everyone and powered by machine learning (ML). AWS DeepRacer brings builders together from around the world, creating a community where you learn ML hands-on through friendly autonomous racing competitions. As we celebrate the achievements of over 560,000 participants from more than 150 countries who sharpened their skills through the AWS DeepRacer League over the last 6 years, we also prepare to close this chapter with a final season that serves as both a victory lap and a launching point for what’s next in the world of AWS DeepRacer.

The legacy of AWS DeepRacer

The AWS DeepRacer community is the heartbeat of the league, where enthusiasts and league legends help foster learning for a global network of AWS DeepRacer participants at any stage of their ML journey. When we launched AWS DeepRacer in 2018, we set out to make ML model training concepts more accessible.

By removing common hurdles associated with the preparation of training and evaluating ML models, AWS DeepRacer gives builders a fun way to focus on fundamental training, evaluation, and model performance concepts, all without any prior experience.

The impact of racing in the league goes far beyond the podium and prizes, with many participants using their AWS DeepRacer experience and community support to advance their careers.

“Embracing the challenges of AWS DeepRacer has not only sharpened my technical skills but has also opened doors to new roles, where innovation and agility are key. Every lap on the track is a step closer to mastering the tools that drive modern solutions, making me ready for the future of technology.”

– AWS DeepRacer League veteran Daryl Jezierski, Lead Site Reliability Engineer at The Walt Disney Company.

Each year, hundreds of AWS customers such as Vodafone and Eviden host AWS DeepRacer events to upskill their employees in the fundamentals of ML through collaborative gamified education.

The transition to an AWS Solution

While the AWS DeepRacer League will no longer be a globally hosted competition by AWS in 2025, you can continue to access the AWS DeepRacer service for training, evaluation, and community racing on the AWS Management Console until December 2025.

Starting in early 2025, the AWS DeepRacer source code will also become available as an AWS Solution; an off-the-shelf deployment of the underlying AWS services, code, and configurations that make up the AWS DeepRacer service. In the short term, this provides you with the option to choose the AWS DeepRacer experience that works best for your organizational needs. The new solution retains all existing AWS DeepRacer console features to train reinforcement learning models using Amazon SageMaker, evaluate models in a simulated 3D environment, as well as race admin controls such as creating, hosting, and managing global races. The new AWS Solution now offers even more flexibility, enabling organizations to provide ML education to employees at scale while choosing the best optimizations for cost and convenience to meet your needs.

AWS DeepRacer continues to be the fastest way to get started with ML training fundamentals, with tens of thousands of builders using AWS DeepRacer programs within their organizations in 2024 alone. In addition to our customers using AWS DeepRacer to kickstart their ML transformation efforts, many of them have told us they are eager for their teams to apply their new skills to solve real business problems with artificial intelligence (AI).

To help them on the next step of their journey, we are launching four new AWS DeepRacer workshops focused on generative AI at AWS re:Invent 2024. These 200 and 300 level hands-on sessions bridge the fundamental concepts of ML using AWS DeepRacer with foundation model training and fine-tuning techniques using AWS services such as SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock for popular industry use cases. In addition, all four workshops will be made available off the shelf alongside the managed AWS DeepRacer solution beginning in 2025.

The road to re:Invent

As the final AWS DeepRacer League races towards a thrilling conclusion, all eyes are on the last heat of the season. In the 2024 League, a heat spans two monthly races, with top racers from each of the six global regions earning a trip to compete in the championships at re:Invent based on their cumulative performance over both races. September marks the launch of the fourth and final heat, the only remaining path for league hopefuls to earn the coveted expenses-paid trip to compete for this year’s record-breaking $50,000 championship prize purse. If you don’t earn a spot during the regular season, you’ll still have one opportunity to make it through by racing live in person during the last-chance qualifying round on December 2 in Las Vegas. For those skilled enough to make it into this year’s championship, the stakes have never been higher. Thirty-two racers will compete for the title of 2024 AWS DeepRacer Champion and a whopping $25,000 first place cash prize.

The destination may be glamorous, but the road to re:Invent is just as sweet—with loads of prizes still up for grabs in each of the six global competition regions. In both September and October, the top 50 and top 3 winners in each region will claim $99 and $250 amazon.com gift cards, respectively. In addition, the first 2,000 eligible racers to submit to the league globally each month will receive $30 in AWS credits.

Don’t miss your chance to be part of AWS DeepRacer history, build your ML skills, collaborate with a global community, and win big. Race in the 2024 AWS DeepRacer League today!

About the Author

Shashank Murthy is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with AWS Machine Learning. His goal is to make it machine learning more accessible to builders through hands-on educational experiences. For fun outside work, Shashank likes to hike the Pacific Northwest, play soccer, and run obstacle course races.