Pika releases open-weight video model Pika H3 Flex: post-trained on MiniMax H3, six-step sampling, five audio stems, API from $0.01 per second
On October 29 Pika released Pika H3 Flex, a joint audio-video generator post-trained on MiniMax H3, with weights on Hugging Face, code on GitHub, and ComfyUI and Diffusers support. Pika says it distilled sampling from 50 denoising steps to six, averages about 1.8x faster DiT denoising than Fal H3 Max at 768p, and can produce a 15-second clip with soundtrack in as little as about 7 seconds; the hosted API adds 1080p to 4K upscaling and five exportable audio stems (dialogue, score, SFX, foley, ambience). All speed and quality figures are vendor-reported.
Key Takeaways
- Pricing (vendor figures): text/image-to-video from $0.01 per output second, reference-to-video from $0.03/s; Pika's comparison table lists MiniMax H3 at $0.08/s and Seedance 2.5 at $0.103/s
- Speed (vendor figures): six-step sampling, about 1.8x faster DiT denoising than Fal H3 Max at 768p on average and about 2x for 10–15 s text/image-to-video; 1.60x faster end-to-end 5 s 768p generation on eight B300 GPUs
- Ranking: Pika's product page says it scores 1293 and ranks #7 on DesignArena's text-to-video board, the highest open-weight model there
- Release form: the Hugging Face repo is tagged as an adapter on MiniMax-H3 under an 'other' license; local inference natively supports 480p/768p with mixed stereo audio, while 4K upscaling and audio stems are hosted-API only
- Accepts up to 12 reference inputs (image, audio, video, sketch and more) and supports style transfer, motion transfer, character swap and targeted edits
Linked Models & Agents:
