Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, entrusted the development of self-driving cars to a young Italian engineer: Marco Pavone, head of research at Nvidia for this initiative launched at CES in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Originally from Turin, he became a professor at Stanford at the age of 32, having studied at the University of Catania before moving on to MIT for his PhD and NASA for his first post. Pavone selected the name for Nvidia's new project: "I named it Alpamayo because it is a mountain I hold in great affection (standing at 5,947 meters in the Andes mountain range, it was chosen by UNESCO as the 'most beautiful mountain in the world' due to its nearly perfect summit pyramid). Elegant and formidable, it is an ideal symbol for our endeavor. However, I could have alternatively chosen the name Matterhorn". According to Nvidia's description, the ambition behind Alpamayo 1 is substantial: "It is an open portfolio of artificial intelligence models, simulation frameworks, and physics AI datasets aimed at accelerating the development of safe, transparent, and reasoning-based autonomous vehicles. Alpamayo enables vehicles to perceive, reason, and act with human-like judgment". In an interview with Corriere della Sera, Pavone discusses his training in Italy. I have recently returned to deliver a seminar at the University of Catania, twenty years after graduating. The academic standards here are notably high, even in the field of exploratory robotics. It is important to remember that Mount Etna serves as a natural testing environment. I attended the Scuola Superiore di Catania, one of the premier institutions of excellence. However, pursuing my PhD at MIT in Boston launched me into another world, thanks also to my PhD advisor Emilio Frazzoli, now teaching in Zurich. He taught me what research really means".