What company launched Alpamayo, an open-source Vision-Language-Action model for autonomous driving, in January 2026?

Nvidia made significant strides in autonomous driving technology in January 2026 with the introduction of its Alpamayo family of open-source AI models and tools. The technology giant unveiled this comprehensive suite, designed to accelerate the development of safe, reasoning-based autonomous vehicles, at CES on January 5, 2026. This launch underscores Nvidia's commitment to fostering innovation in the autonomous mobility sector by providing developers and researchers with powerful, transparent tools.

At the core of this initiative is Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. Unlike traditional autonomous systems that primarily focus on perception and path planning, Alpamayo utilizes "chain-of-thought" reasoning. This allows vehicles to not only process visual input and generate trajectories but also to articulate the logic behind their decisions, bringing a human-like judgment to complex driving scenarios. The Alpamayo family also includes AlpaSim, an open-source, end-to-end simulation framework, and Physical AI Open Datasets, offering extensive driving data for tackling challenging real-world "long-tail" events.

Nvidia's decision to open-source Alpamayo is a pivotal step towards more open and transparent AI development in autonomous driving, aiming to overcome the complexities of achieving Level 4 autonomy. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likened this development to the "ChatGPT moment for physical AI," emphasizing its potential to enable machines to understand, reason, and act in the real world. While Alpamayo models are not intended to run directly in vehicles, they serve as large-scale teacher models that developers can fine-tune and distill into their own autonomous vehicle stacks, fostering a collaborative ecosystem for advancing self-driving capabilities.