At CES 2026 on Monday, NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) unveiled a shift in autonomous vehicle (AV) development with the release of the open-source Alpamayo family. 

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Previous self-driving systems relied on separate modules for “seeing” (perception) and “steering” (planning), while Alpamayo introduced vision language action (VLA) models that possess human-like reasoning capabilities.

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The “Reasoning” Revolution

A core challenge in autonomy has been the “long tail,” which is rare, unpredictable road scenarios that traditional algorithms fail to navigate. 

Nvidia says Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter model, addresses this by using chain-of-thought reasoning. 

“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here, when machines begin to understand, reason and act in the real world,” said ...