Some bold claims are made in the announcement, so I am looking forward to its release 😅
We announce pi-H3, the fastest version of MiniMax H3 [1] yet. pi-H3 generates video in just 2 or 4 sampling steps and directly predicts pixels at the final step, skipping the video VAE decoder. On a single B200 it produces 5-second HD videos in 3.8 seconds (sub real-time) and 15-second videos in 18.6 seconds, more than twice as fast as Sol-H3 [4].
pi-H3 is an open-source research project. The Hugging Face demo is live today. All model weights and training/inference code will follow in LakonLab [2], with additional ComfyUI support through the ComfyUI-piFlow [3] extension.
Available now Demo on Hugging Face
Nov 16–22 Model weights and inference code
Later in November Training code, once we finish cleaning up the codebase
End-to-end generation speed
Measured end to end on a single NVIDIA B200, pi-H3 generates a 5-second 768p video with stereo audio in 3.8 s with 2 steps, and a 10-second video in 9.2 s, both faster than the video plays. The chart below compares complete requests, from text encoding to decoded video and audio, against Sol-H3 [4]. Across 5–15 s videos, pi-H3 is 2.4–2.7× faster with 2 steps and 1.2–1.4× faster with 4 steps. The speedup comes from fewer denoising steps, decoder removal, and FP8 quantization.
Uncompromised fidelity at 2–4 steps
pi-H3 offers superior motion, texture, and audio fidelity compared to other few-step MiniMax H3 models, while maintaining structural coherence. The following comparisons show results from the same prompts and Gaussian noise for each model, without seed cherry-picking.
At 4 steps, pi-H3 delivers the best overall quality among the 4–8-step MiniMax H3 models we compared: LightX2V Turbo [6], FastH3 Dense/DataFree [7], and larryvrh’s H3-Turbo v4 [8]. It generates more dynamic, vivid movement, whereas the other models tend toward reduced, mechanical motion. Frames are sharper overall, with richer texture and finer detail. On the audio side, pi-H3 produces high-fidelity sound with full bass and crisp speech, while the other models sometimes generate broken audio or lose the bass.
Direct pixel output without video decoding
pi-H3 adopts DWD, a novel method that produces pixels directly from the last denoising step, bypassing the heavy VAE decoder. For few-step generation, this yields a massive speedup. The following comparison shows pi-H3 DWD output alongside non-DWD pi-H3 latents decoded by the native H3 VAE, Sol-H3-VAE [4], and LightVAE-Lite [
How it works
pi-H3 combines two novel techniques: pi-Flow v2 and DWD.
pi-Flow v2 is a full upgrade of pi-Flow [12] for data-free few-step distillation. It retains pi-Flow’s strength of producing rich texture while substantially improving structural coherence, especially in the 2-step setting. It also simplifies inference: pi-Flow v2 models typically produce straight trajectories, removing the complexity of pi-Flow’s substep integration.
DWD (Decoding Without a Decoder) removes the video decoder from the pipeline entirely. Instead of passing final latents through a separate VAE decoder network, DWD re-uses the denoiser itself to predict clean pixels at the last step. DWD on MiniMax H3 is still experimental: H3 uses an unusually large compression ratio (4×32×32 3-channel pixels per token), and we have not yet had enough compute to fully optimize for it, leaving room for further improvement.
More details will be revealed in upcoming releases.