Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth provides users with different approaches for labeling their data before training their models, such as Mechanical Turk, third party vendors, or their own employees. Once Ground Truth learns how to annotate in real-time, it will use machine learning to apply labels to the rest of the dataset, saving up to 70 percent of the data labeling cost compared to purely human annotation.

AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning is a new treasure box of machine learning techniques. Over 150 popular algorithms and models collected from both academia and industry are ready for direct deployment to Amazon SageMaker.

AWS SageMaker Reinforcement Learning is a new reinforcement learning service that provides mainstream reinforcement learning algorithms and supports frameworks such as Intel Coach and Ray RL and simulation environments such as SimuLink and MatLab. It can also perfectly integrate with AWS RoboMaker, a new robotics service with a simulation platform.

Amazon SageMaker Neo is a new deep learning model compiler that can deploy trained models on any connected devices with up to 2X improvement in performance.

A toy car for reinforcement learning

AWS also announced AWS DeepRacer, a 1/18 scale fully autonomous model racing car which is driven by reinforcement learning models trained using Amazon SageMaker. DeepRacer is designed to help developers test their driverless technology and models by pitting their vehicles against those of other developers. Researchers can also train and debug machine learning models through an online simulator and then test them on their cars. DeepRacer is now available for pre-order.

AWS has also set up a special competition to encourage researchers and members of the public alike to learn more about reinforcement learning by getting hands-on with AWS DeepRacer. AWS CEO Andy Jassy calls it “the world’s first global autonomous racing league, open to everyone.” The 1/18th scale fully autonomous race car competition announcement comes amid speculation that Amazon might be interested in the field of self-driving vehicles.

Check out the YouTube video of DeepRacer below.

Also announced at AWS Re: Invent is a new family of AI services for non-machine learning experts, including Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend Medical, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon Forecast.

AWS is sending a strong signal with this week’s announcements and releases: The company wants to consolidate its cloud dominance. While AWS remains the №1 public cloud vendor, its advantage is shrinking as Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Alibaba play catch up. Microsoft’s 2018 Q1 cloud revenue topped Amazon’s; Google Cloud last week replaced its CEO with a former Oracle executive; and Alibaba recently announced its first major restructure, upgrading its cloud business unit to Alibaba Cloud Intelligent business unit.

Cloud computing is steadily becoming one of the main business areas for the world’s tech giants, and each and every one of them can be expected to continue working hard to find ways to outmaneuver their rivals.