NVIDIA Unveils Alpamayo AI for Autonomous Vehicle Decision-Making at CES 2026
NVIDIA introduced a new family of open-source artificial intelligence models called Alpamayo at the CES 2026 technology show, aimed at enhancing the decision-making capabilities of autonomous vehicles in complex scenarios.
These models utilize reasoning and logical analysis, enabling vehicles to navigate rare or emergency situations during driving and make the safest choices, while also providing explanations for their actions.
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stated:
"We are on the brink of what could be called 'Chat GPT for embodied AI,' where machines begin to understand, analyze, and act in the real world."
The first model, Alpamayo 1, is a language-based vision model featuring 10 billion parameters. This model enables vehicles to handle complex exceptional situations, such as a traffic light failure at a busy intersection, without prior training on that specific scenario.
Ali Kani, NVIDIA's Vice President of Automotive, emphasized that the system addresses problems by breaking them down into steps, examining all possibilities, and selecting the safest path.
Huang explained that Alpamayo goes beyond merely controlling the steering, brakes, and acceleration; it anticipates future actions and informs the driver of the intended maneuver and the rationale behind it, while determining the optimal route.
The source code for Alpamayo 1 is available on the Hugging Face platform, allowing developers to enhance its performance, create smaller and faster versions, or use it to train simpler driving systems, as well as develop tools for automatic video ranking and decision validation for vehicles.
Developers can also leverage NVIDIA's Cosmos system, which generates artificial worlds for training and testing autonomous driving applications using a combination of real and virtual data. Cosmos serves as a platform for creating environmental representations that aid vehicles in predicting and making safer, more realistic decisions.
With this announcement, NVIDIA positions itself at the forefront of the autonomous driving race, promising a future where intelligent vehicles can think and act wisely while ensuring the highest levels of road safety.
