Pika open-sources six-step Pika H3 Flex video-and-audio model

Standard diffusion video generators require roughly 50 sequential denoising passes, keeping long-form audiovisual synthesis slow and expensive. In Pika H3 Flex, Pika applied multi-stage adversarial step distillation and reinforcement post-training to MiniMax H3, collapsing sampling to six steps so a 15-second 768p clip with synchronised stereo audio finishes in seven seconds of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) compute. The model accepts text, image, audio, and video inputs, conditioning on up to 12 reference assets simultaneously to maintain character, voice, and camera consistency across shots.

Pika published the 480p and 768p model weights on Hugging Face with inference code on GitHub, Diffusers integration, and ComfyUI nodes. On the DesignArena text-to-video leaderboard, Pika H3 Flex ranks first among open-weight models and seventh overall across proprietary systems. Alongside the open release, Pika’s hosted API ($0.01 per second for text- or image-to-video and $0.03 per second for multi-reference generation) adds native upscaling to 1080p, 2K, and 4K plus isolated five-stem audio export covering Dialogue, Score, SFX, Foley, and Ambience, ahead of consumer web rollout on 2 November 2026.

Key numbers

• Six denoising steps (down from 50), producing 15-second 768p stereo clips in seven seconds of DiT compute.
• Supports up to 12 multimodal image, video, and audio reference inputs per generation.
• Ranked number 1 among open-weight models and number 7 overall on DesignArena text-to-video.
• Hosted API priced at $0.01/s (text or image) and $0.03/s (reference), with five-stem audio separation.