Pika Labs AI has released an updated version of its text-to-video generator Pika. The standout new feature in Pika 1.5 is the Pika Effect. With this new tool, you can manipulate objects in your videos with effects such as crushing, inflating, melting, exploding and even turning them into cake.
Who are Pika Labs?
Pika was founded in 2023 by two Stanford Ph.D students, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng. Before going to Stanford, Pika CEO Guo had worked for Meta’s AI research division. The company quickly released Pika 1.0, the first iteration of its text-to-video generator. By the end of 2023, Pika Labs had also secured $55 million in venture capital. These initial investors included Quora Founder Adam D’Angelo and Giphy Co-founder Alex Chung. In addition, in June 2024, Pika Labs announced it had raised another $80 million, bringing the company’s total funding to $135 million.
What is Pika?
Pika is a text-to-video AI generator. When it was first launched in 2023, Pika 1.0 was a generative AI model that supported video generation and editing across various styles. These styles included cinematic, anime, cartoon and 3D animation. The company also claimed that its AI generator enabled the creation of dynamic, engaging videos tailored to your desired style and audience.
What’s new in Pika 1.5?
The headline new feature in Pika 1.5 is the addition of the Pika Effect, also called Pikaffects in the company’s blog post. These include:
- Inflate – this effect makes an object swell up as if it were a balloon.
- Melt – your chosen object will melt into a puddle of liquid as if it were made of wax.
- Explode – as the names suggest, you can blow anything up, scattering it into small pieces.
- Squash – with this effect you can squash an object as if it was made of putty. The effect also makes hands come on the screen to squish your subject.
- Crush – the crush effect will crush any object you apply it to. A hydraulic press comes down to flatten it with a “visually appealing result,” according to Pika Labs.
- Cake-ify – With perhaps the most bizarre effect, you can make any object into cake. A knife will then appear on the screen to cut the object in half, revealing the inside to be cake.
Other upgrades
Pika 1.5 also introduces other new features. There’s now a Bullet Time effect where you can move the camera around an object like a shot from the “Matrix” film series. You can also circle the virtual camera around your subject with the 360-degree camera movement effect. In addition, there is a floating furniture effect. As the name suggests, this feature creates a surreal scene where chairs and tables float in midair.
What we think
Pika 1.5 adds some impressive new effects to the AI-generated videos. In the company’s sample videos, the results of the Pikaffects are high quality and visually striking. The effects are a lot of fun but have limited practical use cases and could quickly become cliched if overused. However, they are an effective demonstration of the power of the Pika AI generator and how quickly the technology is advancing. If you want to blow something up or turn it into cake, try the free version of Pika 1.5 now.
Pricing and availability
Pike 1.5 is available now. With the free plan, you can generate up to 150 videos per month. If you want to make more videos, there are also paid plans. $8 a month gets you 700 video credits; $28 raises that to 2,000 videos, and for $76 a month you can generate unlimited videos. Paying users can also utilize Pika’s lip-sync feature to add audio to your generated characters.
Image courtesy: Olivio Sarikas
