By Reuters December 2, 2025, 10:31:01 AM IST (Published)
Nvidia on Monday released Alpamayo-R1, an open-source AI model designed to accelerate development of self-driving cars by applying advanced “reasoning” techniques. The company, whose chips are central to AI development, also maintains a research arm that publishes open-source code used by other firms.
Alpamayo-R1 is a “vision-language-action” model that converts what a vehicle’s sensors detect into natural-language descriptions. Its key feature is that it “thinks aloud” while planning a route — for example, noting it sees a bike path and adjusting course accordingly — giving engineers clearer insight into why a car chose a particular action.
Previous self-driving systems often struggled to explain their decisions, complicating efforts to diagnose and improve safety. “One of the entire motivations behind making this open is so that developers and researchers can… understand how these models work so we can, as an industry, come up with standard ways of evaluating how they work,” Katie Washabaugh, product marketing manager for autonomous vehicle simulation, told Reuters.
The model is named after Alpamayo, a steep mountain peak in Peru, reflecting the challenge of navigating complex driving scenarios.
