Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a suite of open-source AI models designed to help automakers ‘fast=track’ robotaxi deployments at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, US. The system showcases by Nvidia promises to bring advanced reasoning to autonomous vehicles and tackling ‘long-tail’ driving problems that don’t appear in training data but are critical for safe navigation. Mercedes‑Benz will be the first to adopt Alpamayo, with plans to launch it in the new CLA sedan in the US in early 2026.
Elon Musk on Nvidia’s Alpamayo: Competition still years away
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the announcement made by Nvidia by sharing a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). Musk said that the Nvidia’s tools won’t pose immediate pressure. “Even with Nvidia’s help, it would take several years for automakers to advance their self‑driving systems from being functional to safer than a human driver,” Musk wrote. He further added that scaling up the hardware such as cameras and AI computers across fleets would take several more years. Musk estimated that Alpamayo could become competitive pressure on Tesla in five to six years, or longer.
“The actual time from when FSD sort of works to where it is much safer than a human is several years. The legacy car companies won’t design the cameras and AI computers into their cars at scale until several years after that. So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer,” wrote Musk.In another post Musk said that Nvidia is providing helpful tools to the automotive industry, but the automotive industry is doing very little on their own. “By the end of this year, Tesla will have spent ~$10B cumulatively just on Nvidia hardware for training. We combine that with our own AI4 chips for processing vast amounts of video or we would probably need to spend double that amount.Then we are making ~2M cars/year and rising, all with our dual SoC AI4, 8 cameras, redundancy in steering actuation and others systems, high bandwidth communication, etc,” added Musk.
What is Nvidia’s Alpamayo, an AI model for autonomous vehicles
Nvidia launched Alpamayo – an open source AI model for autonomous vehicles. Announcing the new AI model, CEO Jensen Huang said that it is the world’s first thinking, reasoning autonomous vehicle AI. He further revealed that the Alpamayo is launching on US roads later this year, starting with the Mercedes CLA. “Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions,” he further added. Responding to one such posts about the autonomous vehicle AI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote: “Well that’s just exactly what Tesla is doing 😂 What they will find is that it’s easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.”
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