By By Larry Dignan
Publication Date: 2026-01-05 22:31:00
Nvidia outlined its Alpamayo open AI models and datasets to bring reasoning to autonomous vehicles. At CES 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Mercedes Benz with Alpamayo will hit the road in the first quarter.
Huang said Alpamayo and its collaboration with Mercedes Benz is its first full-stack effort for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The approach with Alpamayo revolves around reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) models that bring human thinking to autonomous vehicle designs.
“Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” said Huang.
It’s a vision shared by Ola Kallenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, spoke on a panel about the company’s AV efforts with Nvidia.
“I had a chance with the combined Mercedes and Nvidia team to drive it through San Francisco and down into Silicon Valley is point to point navigation,” said Kallenius, who noted the AV was operated by “a very sophisticated level two system.
Kallenius noted that the system with Nvidia is more like level 2 plus. “It feels that the car is on rails you’re just driving, and it does everything. I drove uninterrupted for more than an hour through pretty heavy traffic,” he said.
The general idea behind Alpamayo is to create a model and system that can handle novel or rare driving scenarios. Huang said Nvidia will support the models and AV systems on a long-term basis. For Nvidia, the AV effort is a bridge to robotics.
Nvidia released:
- Alpamayo 1, a chain-of-thought…
