Tech company Nvidia has announced a new family of open-source AI tools called Alpamayo at the CES 2026 technology show. Alpamayo is designed to help self-driving cars think and reason like humans, especially in complex or rare road situations.
What is Alpamayo?
Alpamayo is a set of AI models, simulation tools, and large driving datasets that can teach autonomous vehicles to handle difficult driving events, such as unusual traffic or unexpected obstacles more safely. It goes beyond traditional systems by helping cars reason step by step, not just react to what sensors detect.
At the heart of the system is Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter model that takes video inputs and generates both driving decisions and the logic behind them. The company says this makes vehicles safer and more explainable in how they make decisions on the road.
Open Tools for Developers
Nvidia is releasing Alpamayo as open source, meaning developers and researchers around the world can use and improve the models. The package includes:
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Alpamayo 1: a large reasoning AI model,
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AlpaSim: a simulator that mimics real driving conditions, and
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Physical AI Open Datasets: more than 1,700 hours of driving data covering a wide range of road scenarios.
These tools are available on public platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub to help speed up autonomous vehicle development.
Industry Interest
Several major companies and research groups including Lucid Motors, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Uber, and Berkeley DeepDrive, have shown interest in using Alpamayo to build safer and more reliable self-driving systems.
Nvidia says Alpamayo could play an important role in developing Level-4 autonomous vehicles cars that can drive without human input in many conditions by allowing them to understand and respond to challenging real-world scenarios.
New Cars and Future Use
At CES, Nvidia also revealed that vehicles using Alpamayo technology including a self-driving Mercedes-Benz CLA are expected to appear on roads in the United States in 2026, followed by other regions later in the year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described Alpamayo as a “ChatGPT moment for physical AI” that marks a new era for autonomous machines that can understand, reason, and act in the real world.