Nvidia Says the ‘ChatGPT Moment’ for Self-Driving Cars Has Arrived

At CES 2026, Nvidia unveiled Alpamayo — a new open-source AI system designed to let autonomous vehicles reason and make decisions like humans.

According to Nvidia, Alpamayo enables self-driving cars to break down complex driving situations step by step, evaluate multiple outcomes, and choose the safest action — even in scenarios they have never encountered before, such as traffic light failures or unpredictable road conditions.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, describing Alpamayo as a major leap toward safer and more explainable autonomous driving.

At the center of the system is Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter vision-language-action model built with chain-of-thought reasoning. Unlike traditional autonomous driving software, Alpamayo doesn’t just react to sensor data — it reasons about its decisions and can explain why a specific action was taken.

Nvidia is releasing Alpamayo as open source, allowing developers to fine-tune the model, train simpler driving systems, and build tools such as automatic video labeling and decision evaluation. The company is also launching a large open dataset with over 1,700 hours of real-world driving data, along with AlpaSim, an open-source simulator for testing autonomous vehicles in realistic virtual environments.

Nvidia says Alpamayo marks a shift from rule-based autonomy to reasoning-based driving — a step it believes is critical for bringing fully autonomous vehicles to public roads.