Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn’t exactly rattled by Nvidia’s latest push into autonomous driving — and he made that clear in a candid exchange on X this week.
Following Nvidia’s unveiling of Alpamayo, a new end-to-end autonomous driving AI, on Monday, speculation quickly spread online that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) had finally met a worthy rival. Musk, however, doesn’t see it that way. He argues Tesla has already been doing this for years, training its neural networks on massive amounts of real-world data from a live customer fleet, rather than relying primarily on simulated environments or limited, closed deployments.
The Tesla CEO said: “The actual time from when FSD sort of works to where it is much safer than a human is several years. The legacy car companies won’t design the cameras and AI computers into their cars at scale until several years after that. So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer.”
In other replies, Musk downplayed Alpamayo even further, saying that the real challenge isn’t getting to 99% autonomy, but solving “the long tail of the distribution.” Musk also emphasized he’s not worried, noting, “I’m not losing any sleep about this. And I genuinely hope they succeed.”
What makes Musk’s response especially notable is that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears to agree — at least when it comes to Tesla’s current technical lead. In a Bloomberg interview at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Huang praised Tesla’s autonomy stack, saying, “I think the Tesla stack is the most advanced autonomous vehicle stack in the world. I’m fairly certain they were already using end-to-end AI.” He added that whether Tesla’s system explicitly shows reasoning is “somewhat secondary” to the fact that it’s already end-to-end.
Huang went even further, calling Tesla’s approach “state of the art” and saying it’s “a stack that’s hard to criticize.”
Tesla’s confidence isn’t just theoretical. FSD (Supervised) is now available in seven countries, with South Korea joining most recently, and the system continues to attract attention from regulators and lawmakers worldwide. Nvidia’s own Director of AI, Jim Fan, recently described Tesla FSD as the first AI system to pass what he called a “physical Turing test.”
Tesla has even begun testing “unsupervised” FSD on select Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, with no driver or safety monitor onboard. For Musk, the message is simple: competitors may catch up someday — but not anytime soon.
