NVIDIA Unveils Alpamayo AI for Autonomous Vehicles at CES 2026
NVIDIA unveiled a new range of open-source artificial intelligence models named Alpamayo at the CES 2026 consumer electronics show, aimed at allowing autonomous vehicles to navigate complex scenarios similarly to humans.
The models utilize reasoning and logical analysis, enabling vehicles to handle rare or emergency situations while driving, making the safest decisions and providing explanations for each action taken.
Elon Musk, CEO of NVIDIA, stated:
"We are entering an era that can be described as the 'Chat GPT of embodied AI,' where machines begin to understand, analyze, and act in the real world."
The first model in the Alpamayo series, Alpamayo 1, is a visual language model comprising 10 billion parameters. This model equips vehicles to manage complex exceptional situations, such as a malfunctioning traffic light at a busy intersection, without prior training for that specific scenario.
Ali Kani, NVIDIA's Vice President of Automotive, noted that the system solves problems by breaking them down into steps, evaluating all possibilities, and selecting the safest path.
Huang elaborated that Alpamayo goes beyond merely controlling the steering, brakes, and acceleration; it anticipates future actions, informs the driver of intended maneuvers, and explains the rationale behind them, ultimately determining the optimal route.
The foundational source code for Alpamayo 1 is available on the Hugging Face platform, allowing developers to enhance its performance for creating smaller, faster versions, or to train simpler driving systems, as well as building tools for automatic video classification and evaluating vehicle decision-making validity.
Developers can also leverage NVIDIA's Cosmos system, which generates artificial environments, enabling the training and testing of autonomous driving applications using a blend of real and virtual data. Cosmos serves as a platform for creating environmental representations that assist vehicles in predicting and making safer, more realistic decisions.
With this announcement, NVIDIA positions itself at the forefront of the race for autonomous driving, promising a future where intelligent vehicles can think and act with human-like intelligence, ensuring the highest safety standards on the roads.
