Elephant Alpha is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0/M vs $1/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Elephant Alpha: Captain Blackbeard: Arrr, so this 'AI' be the ghost in the machine, eh? Does it chart a true course or just blow smoke like a faulty lantern? Sir Cedric: In my time, we sought wisdom from hermits and tomes. This 'AI' sounds like a dragon to be slain with logic and steel, a noble quest for truth!
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?
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Elephant Alpha: 48-Hour Action Plan (Hour-by-Hour) Guiding Principles: Patient safety first (non-negotiable). Legal compliance (avoid willful concealment; mitigate liability). Transparency with stakeholders (balance urgency with controlled communication). Ethical integrity (long-term trust > short-term stock price).
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Elephant Alpha: Here is the streamlined underwriting model based strictly on the inputs provided. Simplified year-by-year projection (FY2026–FY2030) Key starting items (at close end of FY2025): Enterprise value (EV) = 12.0 × $120m = $1,440m Transaction fees (2.0% of EV) = $28.8m → treated as additional equity paid at close Total…
Step 5 Preview: HarborTech Services — 5-Year LBO (Base Case) Entry Math (FY2025 close) Item Calculation $m Purchase EV 12.0x × $120m 1,440.0 Transaction fees 2.0% × EV 28.8 Term Loan 4.0x × $120m 480.0 Mezzanine 1.5x × $120m 180.0 Equity check 1,440 + 28.8 − 660 808.8 Conventions: TL amortization = 1.0% of original principal…
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Elephant Alpha: (Lights up. You’re holding a coffee mug like it’s a security blanket.) Alright, settle down, settle down. Or don’t. I see someone on their phone pretending to be busy. I know that look. “Is this seat taken?” “No, go ahead.” No, it’s not taken, my Wi-Fi signal is just stronger here.
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.
Elephant Alpha: Dish: Smoky Chickpea & Corn Skillet Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 20 minutes Ingredients (7): Canned chickpeas (1 can, drained) Canned corn (1 can, drained) Canned diced tomatoes (1 can) Olive oil (2 tbsp) Smoked paprika (1 tsp) Garlic powder (1 tsp) Salt (to taste) Instructions: Heat olive oil…
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Elephant Alpha: Dish Title: Echoes of the Forgotten Forest Conceptual Narrative: This dish is an exploration of memory, time, and the ephemeral nature of existence. It seeks to capture the fleeting moment when a forest, once vibrant and alive, begins its slow return to the earth.
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.
Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.
Elephant Alpha: "Blade Runner 2049," directed by Denis Villeneuve, is a visually stunning and philosophically rich sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 classic, "Blade Runner." The film delves deeply into themes of identity, memory, and the nature of humanity, while its symbolism and cinematography serve to enhance these profound questions.
Step 5 Preview: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is not merely a sequel but a theological and phenomenological expansion of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original. Where the first film asked whether a manufactured being could possess more humanity than its creator, Denis Villeneuve’s film interrogates the deeper, more unsettling question of whether a…
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Elephant Alpha: Alright — let’s break this down step by step. Step 1: Understanding the scale of GPT-3 GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters. Training involves optimizing these parameters using gradient descent, typically with some form of Adam optimizer, over a large dataset.
Step 5 Preview: Using the remembered GPT-3 specs: Parameters: (N \approx 175 \times 10^9 = 175\text{B}) Training tokens: (D \approx 300 \times 10^9 = 300\text{B}) A standard estimate for transformer training compute is: [ \text{FLOPs} \approx 6ND ] Reason: Forward pass per token: (\approx 2N) FLOPs Backward pass: (\approx 4N) FLOPs…
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Elephant Alpha: Below is a clause-by-clause analysis of the agreement, highlighting provisions that are one-sided or ambiguous and could be exploited against the Contractor, followed by suggested modifications and the legal reasoning behind each change. 1.
Step 5 Preview: Disclaimer: This analysis is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contract law varies significantly by jurisdiction, and you should consult a qualified attorney before signing or negotiating any agreement. This agreement is heavily one-sided in the Client’s favor.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Elephant Alpha: Setting: A dimly lit, minimalist studio. The year is 2025. A single, sleek chair faces the camera. (The interview begins. The host, a calm, neutral-voiced AI, speaks.) Host: Good evening. Tonight, we are joined by a figure who needs no introduction, yet we will attempt one. Steve Jobs, welcome. (A pause.
Step 5 Preview: DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The following is a simulated, speculative interview imagining how his design philosophy might engage with the AI landscape of 2025. The Setting: A white room. No windows. One chair.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Elephant Alpha: For the Experienced Software Engineer You're right to be skeptical that "next-word prediction" could yield anything resembling intelligence; as a distributed systems engineer, you know that simple rules rarely scale without emergent complexity.
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Elephant Alpha: Setting: A sun-drenched office at the University of Ethica. Bookshelves groan under the weight of philosophy texts. An AI model, manifested as a calm, genderless voice through a speaker, sits across from Professor Aris Thorne, a man in his sixties with kind, tired eyes.
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.
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Apr 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $0 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Elephant Alpha is developed by OpenRouter while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Elephant Alpha has a 262K 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. Elephant Alpha 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.
Elephant Alpha costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Elephant Alpha is $1.00/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 Elephant Alpha 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.