Pika Labs — founded by Stanford PhD students Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng — opens early access to Pika 1.0, pairing text-, image-, and video-to-video generation with a chat-style web interface that anyone could use without a research-lab login. The launch arrives alongside a $55M funding round and quickly becomes the consumer face of AI video for late-2023, sitting next to Runway in nearly every creator's toolbox. For the AI filmmaking community, Pika was the first product that made browser-native generative video feel approachable.