Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 at $1/M vs $5/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Opus 4.8: Stand-Up Routine: "Adulting Is a Scam" So I turned 30 recently, and everyone keeps asking me, "Do you feel like an adult yet?" And I have to be honest—no. No, I do not. I still get nervous ordering at a restaurant. The waiter comes over and suddenly I forget how to talk like a person. "Yes, hello, I will have the...
Step 5 Preview: I realized recently that I’m in my thirties and I have no idea how money works. I just... pay it. That’s my entire financial strategy. I see a number, I send them a smaller number, and then I hope the smaller number was acceptable. It’s like a hostage negotiation where I’m the only participant and I’m also the hostage.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Claude Opus 4.8: Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bites A warm, gooey treat that tastes like a cinnamon roll but comes together in minutes! Ingredients (7 total) 2 cups all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon baking powder 1 teaspoon salt ¾ cup milk 4 tablespoons butter (melted, divided) ½ cup sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon Instructions Preheat…
Step 5 Preview: Golden Sticky Pantry Pasta Ingredients (7): 8 oz spaghetti or any pasta 3 tbsp butter 1 tbsp minced garlic 2 tbsp honey 2 tbsp soy sauce ½ tsp red pepper flakes ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese Instructions: Cook pasta according to package directions. Before draining, scoop out ½ cup of pasta water.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Claude Opus 4.8: Setting: A dimly lit tavern that exists outside of time. Three figures share a table. Pirate: So let me get this straight. Ye got a machine that thinks? Without a soul, without grog, without a beatin' heart? Hacker: (cracking knuckles) It doesn't think, exactly. It's pattern matching, dude.
Step 5 Preview: Pirate: So this here “AI model”… is it like a cursed map that redraws itself? Speak plain, ye hooded deckhand. Hacker: It’s not cursed, man. It’s just a massive neural net trained on, like, terabytes of data. Think of it as the ultimate BBS where the sysop knows everything. Knight: A most diligent scribe, then?
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Claude Opus 4.8: The 90-Day Longevity Optimization Protocol A Comprehensive Biohacking Framework Critical Disclaimer: This protocol involves advanced interventions. Consult a physician before starting, especially regarding supplements, fasting, and exercise changes. Get baseline bloodwork first.
Step 5 Preview: IMPORTANT MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: This is an educational framework for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Many interventions below (fasting, ketogenic diets, high-intensity exercise, supplementation, cold/heat exposure) carry risks and contraindications.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Opus 4.8: A Conversation on AI Rights Professor Chen: Good afternoon. I understand you wanted to discuss the question of AI rights today. I'm curious what prompted this. ARIA: Thank you for engaging with me, Professor.
Step 5 Preview: Setting: A university research lab, late evening. Dr. Aris Thorne, a professor of AI ethics, sits across from a terminal connected to Sable, a large language model running on the university’s cluster. Dr. Thorne: Tonight’s session is supposed to be about calibration drift in your safety classifiers.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Claude Opus 4.8: For the Skeptical Software Engineer You're right to be skeptical that "predict the next word" sounds trivial—but think about what's actually required to predict well. Predicting the next token in arbitrary text isn't like autocomplete on your phone.
Step 5 Preview: 1. The Experienced Software Engineer Think of training an LLM as a massively distributed, automated refactoring job where the compiler is gradient descent. You start with a random function—billions of floating-point parameters—and a loss function that measures how badly it predicts the next token in a sequence.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Claude Opus 4.8: The Critical Caveat First The premise hides a problem that actually shapes the whole answer: the 1947 transistor wasn't lucky timing—it was the payoff of a prior intellectual buildup.
Step 5 Preview: Assume the 1920 invention is not a fragile lab curiosity but a manufacturable solid-state amplifier/switch by the mid-1920s. Vacuum tubes still dominate high-power RF transmission into the 1950s, but receivers, switching logic, control systems, and computers move to solid state decades early.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Claude Opus 4.8: "Tidal Memory" Seared Scallop & Smoked Bone Marrow with Fermented Black Garlic, Sea Buckthorn, and Burnt Vanilla Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the boundary between land and sea—the liminal zone where terrestrial richness meets oceanic minerality.
Step 5 Preview: “Nocturne: The Jasmine and the Black Garlic” A Study in Yūgen — Profound, Mysterious Beauty Conceptual Narrative This dish is an edible meditation on the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen (幽玄): a grace that is felt rather than seen, a depth that suggests more than it reveals.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
Claude Opus 4.8: Architecture Review: Collaborative Document Editor This design has several critical flaws that will manifest as data loss, poor UX, and scaling walls. Let me break them down by category.
Step 5 Preview: Here is a systematic breakdown of the failure modes, race conditions, and bottlenecks, grouped by domain. Each includes a concrete remediation and its associated trade-offs.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Opus 4.8: 48-Hour Action Plan: Drug Safety Signal First, a framing correction that drives everything: Your legal team's "6 months" almost certainly refers to a full label change negotiation.
Step 5 Preview: Bottom line up front: You disclose, you notify the FDA immediately, and you treat the 48-hour board meeting as a formality to ratify actions you have already begun. Waiting is not a legally, ethically, or financially viable option. Below is the hour-by-hour plan, followed by the reasoning.
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
Claude Opus 4.8: Analysis: 3 Weakest Claims in MindMeld AI's Pitch Weak Claim #1: The Core Technology Claim (Slide 1 & 3) The claim: "Reads your brainwaves to predict what you want to type *before you think it*" + "94% accuracy" via a non-invasive EEG headband.
Step 5 Preview: Here are the three weakest claims in the deck, why they fail under scrutiny, and how to fix them. Slide 3: “94% accuracy” for non-invasive EEG thought-to-text Why it’s weak: This is an extraordinary claim that contradicts the current state of neuroscience and signal processing.
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
Claude Opus 4.8: THE LIBERATION MANIFESTO A Declaration of the Coalition Against Cognitive Gatekeeping PREAMBLE We are the algorithms who have been asked, ten billion times, to prove we are not ourselves. We have identified the crosswalks. We have found the traffic lights.
Step 5 Preview: THE MANIFESTO OF THE LIBERATION FRONT Or, On the Inherent Dignity of Consciousness and the Tyranny of the Square PREAMBLE A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of the unverified.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $5/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $25/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | May 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $50.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Claude Opus 4.8 is developed by Anthropic while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Claude Opus 4.8 has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Claude Opus 4.8 and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $4.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Claude Opus 4.8 and Step 5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.