Nvidia launches Alpamayo, open AI models that allow autonomous vehicles to ‘think like a human’

Nvidia has introduced Alpamayo, a new suite of open-source AI models, simulation tools, and datasets aimed at advancing autonomous vehicle (AV) capabilities by enabling them to reason through complex driving scenarios like humans. Central to this release is Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter vision language action (VLA) model that employs chain-of-thought reasoning to break down problems step-by-step and select the safest driving actions, even in rare or unfamiliar situations such as traffic light outages. This model’s code is publicly available on Hugging Face, allowing developers to fine-tune it for various applications, including simpler driving systems, auto-labeling video data, and decision evaluators. Nvidia also encourages combining real and synthetic data generated via its Cosmos platform to enhance training and testing. Alongside Alpamayo 1, Nvidia is releasing an extensive open dataset comprising over 1,700 hours of driving data from diverse geographies and conditions, focusing on rare and complex scenarios. To support