Nvidia's open-source AI for autonomous vehicles

By EngineAI Team | Published on January 14, 2026
Nvidia's open-source AI for autonomous vehicles
Alpamayo, a new collection of open-source AI models and tools that Nvidia recently unveiled at CES 2026, is intended to assist autonomous vehicles in reasoning through challenging driving situations in a manner similar to that of a person.

The specifics:

Alpamayo 1 is a 10B-parameter "chain-of-thought" model that handles uncommon instances outside of training data by dissecting issues step-by-step.

In essence, the model explains its decisions by producing driving trajectories and reasoning traces.

When machines start to think and behave in the real world, Jensen Huang referred to it as the "ChatGPT moment for physical AI."

AlpaSim, an open-source simulation framework, and more than 1,700 hours of real-world driving data are also being released by Nvidia.

Although Waymo and Tesla have demonstrated the viability of robotaxis, their billions of dollars in proprietary R&D are not quite reproducible. Any carmaker or startup can now create reasoning-based AV systems without having to start from scratch thanks to Nvidia's open-sourcing of Alpamayo.

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