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

From The Forward Pass daily issue, October 6, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-06). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-06/rekas-rho-1-distilled-variant-generates-a-5-3-second-video-in-about-a-second-in

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**Top News**

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](https://reka.ai/news/rho-1-collapsing-the-multimodal-stack) · [reka.ai](https://reka.ai/labs/research/rho-1-collapsing-the-multimodal-stack)