According to Sawyer Merritt, NVIDIA has announced Alpamayo, described by CEO Jensen Huang as the world’s first thinking, reasoning autonomous vehicle AI, set to debut on U.S. roads later this year starting with the Mercedes CLA (source: Sawyer Merritt on X, Jan 5, 2026). Alpamayo features end-to-end training, from visual inputs to actuation, leveraging Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that enable self-driving systems to interpret, reason, and act on complex scenarios. The platform incorporates a 10-billion-parameter architecture, large reasoning models, simulation tools for rare scenario testing, and open datasets for robust validation. NVIDIA emphasizes improved transparency and safety, offering open model weights and inferencing scripts to facilitate development and commercial adaptation. This move positions NVIDIA at the forefront of AI-driven autonomous vehicles, opening new business opportunities in automotive AI infrastructure, simulation, and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) (source: Sawyer Merritt on X, Jan 5, 2026).