CES 2026: NVIDIA launches Alpamayo 1 for autonomous vehicles

At CES 2026, NVIDIA announced a significant expansion of its open AI ecosystem, unveiling new models, datasets, and development tools aimed at advancing AI applications beyond digital tasks into physical environments such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and biomedical research. Central to the announcement was the introduction of Alpamayo, a family of open models and tools for reasoning-based autonomous driving. Alpamayo 1, an open vision language action model, enables vehicles to perceive their surroundings and explain their decisions. Complementing this, NVIDIA launched AlpaSim, an open-source simulation framework for training and evaluating autonomous systems, along with Physical AI Open Datasets containing over 1,700 hours of diverse driving data. NVIDIA’s expanded portfolio also includes open models across multiple domains: Nemotron for agentic AI, Cosmos for physical AI, Isaac GR00T for robotics, and Clara for healthcare and life sciences. The company released extensive datasets, including 10 trillion language tokens, 500,000 robotics trajectories, 455