Pika Labs, an AI startup specializing in generative AI for video, has launched version 1.0 of its video generator and announced a successful funding round.
According to Pika Labs, Pika 1.0 uses a new AI model that can generate and edit videos in different styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and film. The startup had already tested the Pika video generator in earlier versions via Discord.
Pika 1.0 is designed to make video creation more accessible and easier for users. The new AI model can create and edit videos similar to Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Stable Diffusion for images in different styles.
Video: Pika Labs
Users can join the waiting list for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.
Pika Labs secures 55 million US dollars
Pika Labs has also raised $55 million in pre-seed and seed rounds led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors include Adam D'Angelo (founder and CEO of Quora), Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face and partner at Factorial Capital) and Craig Kallman (CEO of Atlantic Records).
In September, an update was released that allows letters and images such as logos to be integrated into videos via Pika. This makes it possible, for example, to integrate company logos into videos.
Stable video diffusion allows local video generation
The market for generative AI models for video continues to grow, with Runway being one of the first startups to use AI for video editing. Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, has also recently released its first generative video model.
Stable Video Diffusion outperformed its commercial competitors RunwayML and Pika Labs in user preference studies. The model has been released in two image-to-video versions that can generate 14 or 25 frames at adjustable frame rates between 3 and 30 frames per second and is based on the Stable Diffusion image model. With its 1.0 release, Pika Labs could now be back on top.
If you want to experiment with AI videos, you can also use the Stable Diffusion tool ComfyUI. ComfyUI has recently been updated with support for Stable Video Diffusion, allowing it to run on graphics cards such as the Nvidia GTX 1080 and AMD 6800 XT.
