At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), chip giant NVIDIA made a high-profile announcement of its new Alpamayo series of open AI models and related tools, aiming to tackle the safety challenges in 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 exactly the area that Tesla has been 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 Alpamayo 1 model. This is a visual-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters, using advanced chain-of-thought technology. Its core advantage is enabling vehicles to think like humans, such as autonomously planning routes when encountering complex intersections with unforeseen situations like traffic light malfunctions.
