Nvidia announced new infrastructure and AI models on Monday. The company is working to build the backbone technology for physical AI, which includes robots and autonomous vehicles that can perceive and interact with the real world.
At the NeurIPS AI conference in San Diego, California, the semiconductor giant announced Alpamayo-R1. This is an open reasoning vision language model for autonomous driving research. Nvidia claims this is the first vision language action model focused on autonomous driving. Visual language models can process both text and images together. This capability allows 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, with additional models released in August.
Technology like the Alpamayo-R1 is critical for companies looking to reach level 4 autonomous driving. Level 4 means full autonomy in a defined area and under specific circumstances. Nvidia hopes 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. These resources are collectively called the Cosmos Cookbook. They help developers better use and train Cosmos models for their specific use cases. The guide covers data curation, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation.
These announcements come as the company pushes 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 conversation over the summer, emphasizing physical AI in robotics. Dally stated that robots are going to be a huge player in the world and that Nvidia wants to make the brains of all the robots. To achieve that, the company needs to start developing the key technologies.