Nvidia announces new open AI models and tools for autonomous driving research

Summary

Nvidia announced new infrastructure and AI models on Monday as it works to build the backbone technology for physical AI, including robots and autonomous vehicles that can perceive and interact with the real world. The semiconductor giant announced Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model for autonomous driving research at the NeurIPS AI conference in San Diego, California. The company claims this is the first vision language action model focused on autonomous driving. Visual language models can process both text and images together, allowing vehicles to “see” their surroundings and make decisions based on what they perceive. This new model is based on Nvidia’s Cosmos Reason model, a reasoning model that thinks through decisions before it responds. Nvidia initially released the Cosmos model family in January 2025. Additional models were released in August. Technology like the Alpamayo-R1 is critical for companies looking to reach level 4 autonomous driving, which means full autonomy in a defined area and under specific circumstances, Nvidia said in a blog post. Nvidia hopes that this type of reasoning model will give autonomous vehicles the “common sense” to better approach nuanced driving decisions like humans do. This new model is available on GitHub and Hugging Face. Alongside the new vision model, Nvidia also uploaded new step-by-step guides, inference resources and post-training workflows to GitHub — collectively called the Cosmos Cookbook — to help developers better use and train Cosmos models for their specific use cases. The guide covers data curation, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 These announcements come as the company is pushing full-speed into physical AI as a new avenue for its advanced AI GPUs. Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly said that the next wave of AI is physical AI. Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist, echoed that sentiment in a conversatio...