Nvidia Unveils AI Models That Could Shake Up Autonomous Driving Landscape

The autonomous driving landscape had shifted, ever so slightly, on Monday, when Nvidia unveiled its new open-source artificial intelligence models. This development had an immediate impact on Tesla’s stock, which plummeted around 3% on Tuesday. Nvidia’s introduction of the “Alpamayo family” of AI models marked a significant step towards enabling autonomous vehicles to make decisions in a more human-like way. These models utilized reasoning-based vision language action models, allowing for a more sophisticated level of decision-making. According to Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, the goal was not to simply create another autonomous driving system, but to make this technology accessible to all.

Huang noted that companies like Waymo and Tesla had already developed robust in-house systems, but Nvidia aimed to “do it for everyone else.” The Alpamayo models were designed to take sensor input and control the steering wheel, brakes, and acceleration, while also providing a reasoning behind each action. This capability had the potential to bring about a new era in autonomous driving.

The first passenger car featuring Alpamayo, built on the NVIDIA DRIVE full-stack autonomous vehicle platform, would soon be on the road in the brand-new Mercedes-Benz CLA. Nvidia planned to introduce AI-defined driving in the US this year.