By Pras Subramanian
Publication Date: 2026-01-10 16:00:00
“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here — when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world.”
So said Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang at CES in Las Vegas, throwing down the the robotic gauntlet in a statement about the GPU maker’s latest autonomous driving move.
Nvidia’s Alpamayo is a chain-of-thought, reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) model used for self-driving cars and robotaxis, which the company said is designed to integrate perception, language, and action planning in making decisions.
Huang played a video of Alpamayo in action during his presentation. In it, a test vehicle navigated the streets of San Francisco, performing maneuvers like that of a human driver, without any interventions.
The big question now is whether Nvidia has created a system that is superior to Tesla’s (TSLA) and is on par with what Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo is doing with its best-in-class robotaxis.
Huang is extremely bullish on autonomous driving. The CEO said he sees a future with a billion autonomous cars on the road. Nvidia has been plugging away at self-driving tech for over 10 years now. Last year, Huang predicted physical AI solutions…
