A deep dive from Yahoo Finance, January 11:
"The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here — when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world."
So said Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang at CES in Las Vegas, throwing down the the robotic gauntlet in a statement about the GPU maker's latest autonomous driving move.
Nvidia's Alpamayo is a chain-of-thought, reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) model used for self-driving cars and robotaxis, which the company said is designed to integrate perception, language, and action planning in making decisions.
Huang played a video of Alpamayo in action during his presentation. In it, a test vehicle navigated the streets of San Francisco, performing maneuvers like that of a human driver, without any interventions.
The big question now is whether Nvidia has created a system that is superior to Tesla's (TSLA) and is on par with what Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo is doing with its best-in-class robotaxis.
Solving for autonomous driving — the Tesla neural net approach
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang introduces Alpamayo autonomous vehicles during Nvidia Live at CES 2026, ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, on Jan. 5. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
Huang is extremely bullish on autonomous driving. The CEO said he sees a future with a billion autonomous cars on the road. Nvidia has been plugging away at self-driving tech for over 10 years now. Last year, Huang predicted physical AI solutions like autonomous driving would be a "multitrillion-dollar" opportunity.
At CES, Huang said the upcoming Mercedes CLA EV would be the first to implement Nvidia's full self-driving (FSD) stack that includes Alpamayo in Q1, and that it plans to have to autonomous robotaxis — like Waymo's — with partners like Uber (UBER) and Lucid (LCID) by 2027. Currently, Alpamayo is Level 2 advanced, meaning it can operate autonomously but requires human supervision.
All the major players in the autonomous space have the same goal, which is Level 4 autonomous, meaning the cars are fully self-driving within a geographic zone. While Waymo has achieved this in some markets, at the moment Tesla and Nvidia's current DRIVE Hyperion system are at Level 2. Nvidia is targeting Level 4 capability with Alpamayo soon.
Katie Driggs-Campbell, a professor at the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, told Yahoo Finance that she's impressed so far by Nvidia's progress, though she warns that that PR hype can overtake reality.
On its face, Alpamayo is a step beyond what Tesla is doing with its closed FSD system, which powers its EVs and robotaxis, Driggs-Campbell said, though Tesla's system requires supervision at this time, meaning its Level 2 autonomy. Nvidia's Alpamayo claims to be aiming for Level 4 when fully deployed, and FSD aims to get there as well with further software updates.
Tesla's FSD is an end-to-end neural network trained on massive amounts of real-world fleet driving data to make perception and control decisions. Tesla shifted from rule-based control and separate modules, per an Elon Musk edict, to a single neural network system that goes from camera input to vehicle control outputs, with no explicit reasoning....
....MUCH MORE
