Nvidia introduced its Alpamayo artificial intelligence (AI) platform for autonomous vehicles and provided details on its next generation of chips at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The Alpamayo platform is designed to enable self-driving cars to perform reasoning functions, navigate complex environments, and explain their driving decisions. Concurrently, the company announced that its next-generation Rubin chips are in full production, with the Vera Rubin platform expected to debut later this year.
Alpamayo AI Platform for Autonomous Vehicles
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented Alpamayo as a new AI technology intended to facilitate advanced reasoning in autonomous vehicles (AVs). The platform aims to integrate visual input with language-like reasoning processes, which Nvidia states will allow AVs to handle complex scenarios, such as unexpected roadworks or unusual driver behavior. Huang characterized this development as a "ChatGPT moment for physical AI," highlighting a progression in machines' ability to comprehend, reason, and act in real-world environments.
Key Features and Components:
- Reasoning Capabilities: Alpamayo is designed to move beyond pattern recognition, enabling AVs to process unfamiliar scenarios incrementally and provide "chain-of-thought" reasoning, enhancing explainability for their decisions.
- Open-Source Ecosystem: The Alpamayo family includes open AI models, simulation tools, and datasets.
- Alpamayo 1: A 10-billion-parameter vision language action (VLA) model available on Hugging Face. It utilizes video input to generate trajectories and corresponding reasoning traces, allowing developers to adapt it for specific AV stacks.
- AlpaSim: An open-source, end-to-end simulation framework released on GitHub, offering realistic sensor modeling, configurable traffic dynamics, and scalable closed-loop testing.
- Physical AI Open Datasets: Over 1,700 hours of driving data, collected across various geographies and conditions, including rare "long-tail" scenarios, are available on Hugging Face. These datasets are intended for advancing reasoning architectures.
Vehicle Integration and Rollout:
Nvidia has partnered with Mercedes-Benz to produce a driverless vehicle, the Mercedes-Benz CLA, which utilizes Alpamayo technology. This vehicle is scheduled for release in the United States in the coming months, with subsequent rollouts planned for Europe and Asia. A demonstration video reportedly showed an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz operating in San Francisco without manual driver intervention, with Huang stating the system learned directly from human demonstrators and provides explanations for its actions.
Future Plans:
Nvidia also disclosed plans to launch a robotaxi service by next year in partnership with an undisclosed entity, with the location yet to be announced. The company's stated long-term objective is for all cars and trucks to eventually become autonomous. Mobility companies and research institutions, including JLR, Lucid, Uber, and Berkeley DeepDrive, have indicated interest in leveraging Alpamayo for developing level 4 autonomous capabilities.
Next-Generation Rubin Chips
In addition to the autonomous vehicle announcements, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang provided details on the company's next generation of chips. These chips are reported to be in full production and are stated to deliver five times the computing power of previous Nvidia products for AI applications like chatbots.
Vera Rubin Platform:
Further information was shared regarding the new "Vera Rubin platform," which is anticipated to debut later this year. The platform is expected to consist of six separate Nvidia chips. The flagship server configuration will reportedly include 72 of the company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and 36 of its new central processing units (CPUs). Huang indicated these could be configured into "pods" containing over 1,000 Rubin chips, with the aim of improving the efficiency of generating AI "tokens" by a factor of 10. The Rubin chips are reported to utilize a proprietary data type. Nvidia faces competition in the market for delivering AI products to end-users from entities such as Advanced Micro Devices and Google.
Industry Reception
Analyst Paolo Pescatore of PP Foresight commented that the Alpamayo announcement reinforces Nvidia's position in integrating AI hardware and software, indicating a strategic shift towards becoming a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, responded on social media by noting similarities with Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance software. Musk stated that achieving 99% functionality is straightforward, while resolving the remaining edge cases presents significant challenges.
Following Huang's presentation, shares of the AI chip designer experienced a slight increase in after-hours trading.