At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), chip giant NVIDIA made a high-profile debut of its new Alpamayo series of open AI models and related tools, aiming to tackle the safety challenges of autonomous driving through large model technology. However, this move quickly caught the attention of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, who made a pointed comment on social media.

Musk stated that what NVIDIA is currently doing is already a field that Tesla has been deeply focusing on. He bluntly pointed out that achieving a 99% level in autonomous driving development is relatively easy, but the real challenge lies in solving the extremely complex and rare "long-tail problems."

The core of NVIDIA's demonstration was the Alpamayo1 model. This is a visual-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters, utilizing advanced chain-of-thought technology. Its core advantage allows vehicles to think like humans, for example, when encountering complex intersections with unexpected situations such as traffic light failures, it can autonomously plan a route.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang expressed confidence in his company's technology and revealed that the first vehicle equipped with this technology is expected to be officially launched in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2026. Despite this, Musk's comments undoubtedly added tension to the autonomous driving competition, as he believes that Tesla's experience in handling extreme distribution data is the key to determining whether autonomous driving can ultimately be implemented.