Reka's Rho-1 distilled variant generates a 5.3-second video in about a second in internal tests

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Reka presents Rho-1 as an alternative to multi-model agentic pipelines. It is one 19B network, trained from scratch, that handles text, images, video, reasoning and actions. Reka calls it a proof of concept.

Here's what makes this credible:

• A distilled variant cuts denoising from 99 steps to 8 and generated a 5.3-second video in about a second in Reka's internal tests.
• The first clip arrives in 7.0 seconds, against 13.8 seconds for an illustrative multi-agent pipeline.
• Action channels are native to the model, not added through a robotics wrapper.
• Understanding and generation expert streams share attention and a KV cache, trained with next-token prediction and flow matching.
• Training took 320 H100 GPUs for three months.

One catch: it is a research preview with structural drift in long rollouts, unreliable object grounding and native video capped at 672×384.

Why care? Reka pitches Rho-1 as a unified alternative for real-time simulation and robotics.

Sources: reka.ai · reka.ai