Pika H301 / 11
What is Pika H3?

What is Pika H3?

Pika H3 Flex is the open-weight release behind that search. Pika post-trained it on MiniMax H3. Six sampling steps write the picture and stereo audio together.

Map02 / 11
Four questions

Name, base, path, and license

The name

Pika H3 Flex is the published family.

The base

Adapters on MiniMax H3, not a new network.

The path

Local weights, ComfyUI, Diffusers, or the Pika API.

The limit

The MiniMax license excludes four territories.

Release03 / 11
The release

One family, picture and sound

Pika published Pika H3 Flex on 29 October 2026. Weights are on Hugging Face, inference code is on GitHub, and ComfyUI has workflows. The hosted path is the Pika API.

The product page is pika.art/pika-h3-flex. The README calls its playground link Try it now. That link is the API playground, not a separate local demo.

Lineage04 / 11
MiniMax H3

Post-training, not a new architecture

Base

Flex runs on MiniMax H3. ComfyUI loads the adapters onto that base.

Train

Pika’s research post describes fine-tuning, distillation from 50 steps to six, then merged reward and preference LoRAs.

Shape

Two FP32 LoRA adapters, rank and alpha 128. FL2VA uses transformer. Ref2VA uses transformer_ref.

Files

The base files stay MiniMax’s. One workflow loads one transformer partition.

Pass05 / 11
The pass

FL2VA, Ref2VA, and six steps

FL2VA

Text (t2va), first frame (i2va), last frame (l2va), or both frames (fl2va).

Ref2VA

Up to 9 images, 3 videos, and 3 audio clips: 12 files. At least one image or video.

Schedule

Six forwards. Knots: 1000, 750, 500, 250, 100, 40, 0. Generic six-step Euler is not this schedule.

Audio

32 kHz stereo, mixed into a 24 fps MP4. Local canvas is 480p or 768p.

Install06 / 11
Install

Four ways to run Pika H3 Flex

CLI

Clone Pika-Labs/Pika-H3-Flex. Install pika-h3-pro with pip, Conda, or Docker. Python 3.12, one NVIDIA GPU.

Weights

Hugging Face Pika-Labs/Pika-H3-Flex. Both tasks are about 210 GB of base files plus 5.5 GB of adapters.

ComfyUI

LoRAs on the MiniMax H3 base: text, reference, and first-last templates. Strength 1.0. Do not stack a turbo LoRA.

Diffusers

Examples in the repo, separate from the CLI, pinned to a public Diffusers commit.

Split07 / 11
Local and hosted

What the weights include

Local

Native 480p or 768p, 5 to 15 seconds, one GPU. A 5-second request is 124 frames. Checked examples use one H100 80GB.

Finish

API draft-to-video makes 1080p, 2K, and 4K. Pika’s research post says that upsampler is hosted and planned for open release.

Stems

The API returns Dialogue, Music, and Effect. The research post names five stems. Those Pika pages disagree. Use the API page.

Speed

The product page says faster than real time. The footnote is average DiT time, not end-to-end latency, and not a local measurement.

Prompt08 / 11
Prompting

Write the shot, then the sound

Compare09 / 11
Beside other tools

Open adapters, hosted finishing

Closed

Runway, Sora, and other hosted-only video APIs keep the weights private. Flex publishes adapters. 1080p and above, stems, and prompt rewriting stay on the Pika API.

Base H3

Same family. Pika describes six-step sampling with audio in the pass, against a 50-step teacher. The base license still applies.

Ranks

The research post says “#1” and “up to 91%”. The product page cites another board. Those are vendor statements, not independent scores.

Choice

Local weights fit 480p or 768p where the license allows. Use the API for finishing. Read both docs before you mix them.

License10 / 11
Read this first

The license excludes four territories

Weights

The adapters are Model Derivatives under the MiniMax H3 Community License. Apache-2.0 covers inference code and the Qwen3-VL encoder, not the weights.

Territory

Excluded Territories: the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and the United States. Use in those territories is not authorized.

Ask

MiniMax says people there can request a separate license. More than 20 million US dollars in yearly revenue needs prior written authorization.

Scope

This reads the public license. It is not legal advice. The acceptable-use policy still applies inside the allowed territory.

Sources11 / 11
Sources

What this deck is willing to cite

Public pages, read in November 2026. Vendor rankings stay vendor statements. More free explainers: Knowledge Hall.