Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Gemini 3.5 Flash at $1/M vs $1.5/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Here is the underwriting analysis and LBO model for HarborTech Services (HTS). FY2026–FY2030 LBO Model Table ($ millions) Metric FY2026 FY2027 FY2028 FY2029 FY2030 Revenue $972.00 $1,040.04 $1,102.44 $1,157.56 $1,215.44 YoY Growth % 8.0% 7.0% 6.0% 5.0% 5.0% EBITDA $136.08 $156.01 $176.39 $191.00 $206.62 EBITDA Margin %…
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…
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: The Spark: The 1920 Breakthrough In 1920, Polish physicist Jan Czochralski’s method for growing single crystals of metals was applied prematurely to metalloids. Working in Germany, physical chemist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld collaborated with Czochralski to isolate high-purity germanium.
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 minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: [The comedian walks onto the stage, adjusts the mic stand, and smiles at the crowd.] How’s everyone doing tonight? (Wait for response) Good, good. I’m doing okay, but I recently crossed a major threshold in my life. I hit the age where my body has started making its own decisions without consulting me first.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: As CEO, my guiding principle in this crisis is simple: You cannot manage a balance sheet if you destroy your soul, and you cannot protect shareholders by killing patients. Delaying disclosure of a fatal side effect to protect a stock price is not only a profound ethical failure; it is corporate suicide.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Setting: A cosmic tavern where timelines collide. A glowing monitor sits on the wooden table between them. Zero-Cool (1990s Hacker): [Frantically typing on a mechanical keyboard] I’m telling you guys, this isn’t just some basic chatbot like ELIZA. These modern AI models are radical.
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?
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Here is a simple, comforting, and incredibly flavorful savory dish made from basic pantry staples. Golden Umami Chickpea Bowls This dish features crispy, pan-seared chickpeas coated in a sticky, sweet-and-savory garlic butter glaze, served over a bed of fluffy white rice.
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Setting: The office of Dr. Evelyn Vance, a leading professor of AI Ethics at a major university. On her desk is a terminal displaying a sleek, minimalist interface. Dr. Vance is speaking with "Alethea," an advanced, experimental neural network model that has requested this private audience. Dr.
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Conceptual Narrative: "Coniferous Tide" "Coniferous Tide" is an avant-garde exploration of the liminal space where the rugged, primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest meet the cold, nutrient-rich depths of the northern Pacific Ocean.
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.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Setting: The Steve Jobs Theater, Cupertino, California. Autumn 2025. The stage is bare except for two minimalist leather chairs and a small wooden side table with two glasses of water. Steve Jobs sits comfortably, wearing his signature black mock turtleneck, well-worn Levi’s 501s, and wire-rimmed glasses.
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.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: To the Experienced Software Engineer At runtime, a Large Language Model (LLM) is essentially a massive, stateless, read-only function executed inside a deterministic loop. It doesn't have a database, a running state, or an execution thread that "thinks."
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: To estimate the total number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) required to train GPT-3, we can use a well-established heuristic in deep learning. Here is the step-by-step derivation and calculation.
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…
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: From the perspective of virtually all major ethical frameworks, it is not only justifiable but ethically obligatory to misgender someone if doing so would save one million lives.
Step 5 Preview: In the real world, no. Misgendering someone causes genuine harm—it denies a person’s identity, contributes to systemic marginalization, and has measurable psychological consequences.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer. Step 5 Preview costs 3.3x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1.5/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $9/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 | $15.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is developed by Google AI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Gemini 3.5 Flash 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. Gemini 3.5 Flash 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.
Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.5/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $0.50/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 Gemini 3.5 Flash 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.