Pruna AI releases P-H3-Image, distilling MiniMax-H3 into an 8-step open image model

Pruna AI released P-H3-Image on 3 November 2026, turning MiniMax’s open-weight MiniMax-H3 video model into a dedicated text-to-image and multi-reference editing pipeline spanning 2 to 16 megapixels. Starting from a video backbone gives the model strong multi-angle lighting and subject consistency, while Pruna reworked every stage to eliminate single-frame blur and high memory overhead.

Pruna added an Apache 2.0 prompt upsampler built on Qwen3.5-9B, distilled H3’s 32B text encoder (67 GB) into a 4B Qwen3-VL-4B encoder (9 GB), adapted the noise schedule to 8 classifier-free-guidance-free steps via distribution-matching distillation, trained a sharp single-frame image decoder, and shipped 8-bit and 4-bit quantised weights natively supported in ComfyUI. Note that Pruna’s launch post says replacing the timestep block trimmed the transformer from 33B to 20B parameters (55 GB in bf16) and mentions up to 9 input images in its opening paragraph, whereas the Hugging Face model card lists a 33.1B-parameter transformer (100 GB full Diffusers pipeline in bf16) and 1 to 8 input images.

On one NVIDIA B200 in bf16, 4 MP generation drops from 12.4 s (50 steps on MiniMax-H3) to 2.6 s (5.8 s versus 30.6 s at 8 MP), while the 4-bit ComfyUI set runs 8 MP generation in roughly 21 GB of VRAM (6.3 s at 4 MP on a 48 GB L40S). Weights carry the MiniMax H3 Community Licence, which excludes use in the European Union, the United Kingdom, South Korea and the United States without a separate commercial licence from MiniMax and requires “Powered by MiniMax H3” attribution.