Nvidia’s (NVDA) shares rose on Monday after the heavyweight chip designer rolled out “the world’s first industry-scale” open-source software for the development of self-driving vehicles.
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The software is dubbed Alpamayo R1 and will be released on coding collaboration platform GitHub and open-source machine learning ecosystem Hugging Face.
Nvidia Launches VLA Model for Autonomous Driving
According to the chipmaker, the software — which is named after a popular mountain in Peru — was designed with a vision-language-action (VLA) model for autonomous driving.
This means that the self-driving model can enable vehicles to detect road obstacles, reason through them, and react to them, e.g., by avoiding a bike lane in a pedestrian-heavy area. Nvidia noted that “reasoning gives autonomous vehicles the common sense to drive more like humans do.”
The chipmaker also noted that these features are key to enabling autonomous vehicles to reach level 4 autonomy — that is, the point where they can drive independently without human supervision.
Nvidia noted that researchers can customize the model for non-commercial uses. The model is the latest rollout by Nvidia in its Nemotron family of open technologies for AI development.
Nvidia Deepens Interest in Self-Driving Tech
The new release is the latest evidence of Nvidia’s continued interest in advancing self-driving technology. Already, Nvidia has teamed up with electric vehicle maker Lucid (LCID) to introduce its self-driving hardware setup DRIVE AGX and its related operating system DriveOS to Lucid’s upcoming midsize vehicle.
The chipmaker — which backs Chinese autonomous driving firm WeRide (WRD) — also recently partnered with Uber (UBER) to use the ride-hailing company’s vast pool of real-world driving data to help refine its Cosmos models. These models are designed to understand real-world physical environments and are tailored for uses such as developing autonomous vehicles and robots.
Is NVDA a Good Buy Right Now?
On Wall Street, Nvidia’s shares continue to enjoy a Strong Buy consensus rating. This is based on 39 Buys, one Hold, and one Sell assigned by 41 analysts over the past three months.
Moreover, at $257.72, the average NVDA price target implies 44% upside from the current trading levels.
