Tesla CEO Musk brushes off Nvidia self-driving competition
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., left, and Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that it will take several years before Nvidia’s new autonomous vehicle models pose serious competition to the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.
During the CES conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Alpamayo, a family of open artificial intelligence models for autonomous development.
Musk responded to the reveal in an X post from a user who likened the system to Tesla’s FSD. Musk said it would take many years before self-driving technology becomes much safer than a human driver.
“The legacy car companies won’t design the cameras and AI computers into their cars at scale until several years after that,” he said in a post. “So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer.”
Nvidia described Alpamayo as a vision language action model that applies “humanlike thinking” to self-driving systems in order to make decisions about rare or novel scenarios.
The billionaire said in a separate X post on Tuesday that Nvidia will find it “easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.”
FSD has been central to Tesla’s long-term vision and revenue growth strategy.
The company launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, last summer. Tesla also operates a ride-hailing service in San Francisco, but there is a driver behind the wheel at all times.
Although Musk has been promising self-driving EV cars for over a decade, he said last August that the company is training a new FSD model.
