 Everyone, welcome back from theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas with AWS Remars. It's one of the re-shows, as we know, re-invent is the big show. Now they have focus shows, reinforces coming up that security, remars is here, machine learning, automation, robotics and space, I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, Director of Machine Learning Thought Leadership with AWS, great to see you again. Keep it alumni, welcome back, you're back every time we got DeepRacer, always to talk about. Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here, I appreciate it. So I want to get into the DeepRacer in context here, but first, Remars is a show that's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press, not a lot of news, because it's not a newsy show, it's more of a builder, kind of a convergent show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a moment in time that I think is going to be one of those timeless moments where we're going to look back and saying, that year at Remars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping, you get machine learning, scaling, robotics is hot, it's now transforming fast, just like the back office data center did years ago, and sort of like a surge is coming. What's your take of this show? Yeah, and all of these three or four components are all coming together, right, and they're intersecting rather than just being in silos, right? So we're seeing machine learning enabled perception sort of on robots applied to space and sort of these extra sort of application initiatives, and that's what's really exciting about this show, is seeing all these things come together, and all the industry wide examples of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them in this show? What's in it for me? What's all this show, what does it mean? Yeah, it's just a glimpse into where things are headed, right, and it's sort of the tip of the iceberg, it's sort of the beginning of the wave of these sort of advanced capabilities that we're going to see imbued in applications across all different industries. Well, great to have you in theCUBE. Every time we have an event we want to bring you on because DeepRacer has become the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following, it's become massive following, and which started out as an IOT, I think Raspberry Pi, first time was like a- We did a little camera initially, yep. And it was just kind of a fun little clever, I won't say heck, but just done a project that just took on a life of its own. Where are we? What's the update with DeepRacer? You're here with the track. Yeah, we've got the track. And competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there, Boston Dynamics. Well, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah, so DeepRacer is the fastest way to get hands-on with machine learning. We designed it as a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using a simulation to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So DeepRacer includes a 3D racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car, so you can take the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this 118th scale kind of RC car that's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra Intel x86 processor inside here, and this thing will drive itself autonomously around the track. And of course, what's a track and some cars driving around it without a little competition? So we've got the DeepRacer League that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models because they go off the track and I see people and it's, oh my God, then they got to reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch. And every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list at re-invent. It's almost like a super score. It gets you up. Take us through the re-invents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. Yeah, absolutely. So we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at RIMARS and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical races and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. So we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical, and the top ones of them come together at re-invent every year in November, December. And we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where the field gets narrow to 10 racers and then those 10 racers race to hold up the championship cup and earn a whole set of prizes, either cash or scholarships or tuition funds, whatever the developer is most interested in. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on theCUBE because I'm smiling. It's so much fun. I mean, if I hadn't been at the theCUBE anyways, I'd love to do this. Would you ever imagine when you first started this that it would be such, so popular and at the rise of e-sports, so you know, Discord is booming, theCUBE even has a Discord channel now. Sure, sure. I'm not that good on it yet, but we'll get there. Just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who want to compete. Have you ever thought there would be this big? We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched DeepRacer. You know, we envisioned this as a way for developers who had already graduated from school, they were in a company, they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies and they're saying, this is really fun, like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and National Australia Bank all adopting DeepRacer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. The second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use DeepRacer because you needed an AWS account, you had to have a credit card, you might get billed, there was a free tier involved. And so what we did this past year was we launched the DeepRacer Student League, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college. DeepRacer Student includes 10 hours a month of free training so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course, the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win prizes. So they don't have to go under the dark web, hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a DeepRacer. They can now come in on their own. That's right, that's right. They can log into that virtual environment and get access. And one of the other things that we realized, and that's a common kind of realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning, but also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners. And this applies to the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, hey, you know, the world's going to see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of DeepRacer Student. So now students can register and opt in to the scholarship program. And we're going to give out Udacity scholarships to 2,000 students at the end of this year who compete in AWS DeepRacer Student Racers and also go through all of the learning modules online. Okay, hold on, let me just back up because this sounds pretty cool. All right, so we kind of went fast on that. I'm a little bit slow today. You know what I'm gonna do. So if they sign up for the student account, which you lowered the barriers for, and they Intel and Odessa, Odessa is a courseware for the machine learning. That's right. So in order to participate, we're gonna check the boxes and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with a scholarship after the fact. So Intel's a partner of ours in putting this on. So it's both helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who get qualified for the scholarship and win one of those 2,000 Udacity nano degree scholarships, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel professionals will help mentor these students, give them career advice, give them technical advice, it's better to help grow them. They're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just going to get through the data here. So is it money or credits for the training? That's the scholarship or both? So the student training is free for students. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just you log in and you get your account. Then the 2,000 Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to the winners of the student scholarship program. It's a four month long class on Python programming for AI. So it's real education. Yeah, it's like real. So once here's 10 hours, here's check the boxes, here's the manual. Yep, everybody gets access to that. That's free to the student, over 16 free. So that probably going to increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now in terms of scope to scale here for me? Yeah, we've been pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the DeepRacer student program. And of those, over 30,000 have opted in to that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest from across the globe in this virtual students opportunity. And students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun DeepRacer kind of hands-on racing. And obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity. Or how many people are in the AWS DeepRacer group now? Because now someone's got to work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, you know, we're pretty efficient with, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience imbuing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements, you know. One of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a Discord channel. So not only can the students get hands-on, but they also have this built-in community of other students now to help support them, bounce ideas off of, and, you know, improve their learning. Awesome. So what's next? Take us through after this event. What's going on for you? More competitions? Yeah. So we're going to be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico City, you know, this week we were in Milan, you know, we've got some AWS public sector activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in Ottawa, in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events both for students, as well as for the professionals who want to compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at re-invent. So we'll be back here in Vegas at the beginning of December, where our champions will compete to host the competition. Look how it should go into all the summits. For most of the summits are all of them. Any time there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to get hands on. The track is always open. Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE with the update. Appreciate it, Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be here. Pleasure to know you. Appreciate it. Love the program. All right, CUBE coverage here. DeepRace always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events. More excited than theCUBE, some say, but almost. Great to have you on, Mike. Great success. Check it out. Free to students. The area's been lowered to get in. Every robotics club, every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. It's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course, you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. I just wanted to learn that. All right, CUBE coverage coming back after this short break.