NVIDIA has unveiled the NVIDIA Alpamayo family of open AI models, simulation tools and datasets designed to accelerate the next era of safe, reasoning‑based autonomous vehicle (AV) development.
Traditional AV architectures separate perception and planning, which can limit scalability when new or unusual situations arise.
Recent advances in end-to-end learning have made significant progress, but overcoming these long-tail edge cases requires models that can safely reason about cause and effect, especially when situations fall outside a model’s training experience.
NVIDIA stated that the Alpamayo family introduces chain-of-thought, reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) models that bring humanlike thinking to AV decision-making.
VLA models process dynamic scenarios step by step, improving driving capability and explainability which is critical to scaling trust and safety in intelligent vehicles.
NVIDIA founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, said: “The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here — when machines begin to understand, reason and act in the real world.
“Robotaxis are among the first to benefit. Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments and explain their driving decisions — it’s the foundation for safe, scalable autonomy.”
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