GLM 4.5 Air is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.2/M vs $1/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
GLM 4.5 Air: 1. Simplified Year-by-Year Table (FY2026–FY2030) Metric FY2026 FY2027 FY2028 FY2029 FY2030 Revenue ($m) $972 $1,040 $1,102 $1,157 $1,215 EBITDA ($m) $136 $156 $177 $191 $207 EBITDA Margin 14.0% 15.0% 16.0% 16.5% 17.0% Cash Interest ($m) - Term Loan (9.0%) $48.6 $48.1 $47.6 $47.0 $46.4 - Mezzanine (12.0%) $21.6 $21.6…
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-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
GLM 4.5 Air: Of course. Here is a comprehensive, 3-month, cutting-edge longevity and biohacking plan designed for a dedicated individual. This plan is structured in three distinct phases, each building upon the last to progressively optimize the body's systems for resilience, performance, and longevity.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
GLM 4.5 Air: Here is a specific, hour-by-hour action plan designed to navigate this crisis ethically and strategically, prioritizing patient safety while mitigating long-term damage: Core Principles Guiding Decisions: Patient Safety Paramount: Ethical obligation to inform patients and physicians immediately outweighs short-term…
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.
GLM 4.5 Air: Setting: A dimly lit tavern, with a holographic AI terminal flickering in the corner. Characters: Captain Flint (Pirate): Eye patch, tricorn hat, and a peg leg. Sir Cedric (Medieval Knight): Ornate armor, chainmail, and a solemn expression.
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 minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
GLM 4.5 Air: (Lights up. Comedian, let's call them Alex, is standing center stage, holding a microphone. They look out at the audience with a wry, knowing smile.) Hey, thanks. Thank you. It’s good to be here. You ever have one of those weeks where you just feel… obsolete?
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.
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
GLM 4.5 Air: Here are the 3 weakest claims in the MindMeld AI pitch deck, along with explanations and concrete improvements: Weakest Claim: "We're building the future of human-AI collaboration. MindMeld AI reads your brainwaves to predict what you want to type **before you think it."
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
GLM 4.5 Air: To estimate the total FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) required to train GPT-3, we follow a step-by-step reasoning based on the model's architecture, training data, and computational operations. GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters, a sequence length of 2048 tokens, and was trained on 300 billion tokens.
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…
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
GLM 4.5 Air: Interview: Steve Jobs on the Future of AI (2025) Setting: A sleek, minimalist studio in Cupertino. Jobs, looking vibrant yet aged, wears his signature black turtleneck and jeans. The interviewer, Alex, sits opposite him. Alex: Steve, welcome. It’s 2025—AI is everywhere. What’s your take on this revolution?
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
GLM 4.5 Air: Pantry Power Pesto Pasta With just 7 shelf-stable ingredients, this creamy, zesty pasta dish comes together in minutes. It’s rich in flavor, budget-friendly, and perfect for busy weeknights!
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.
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
GLM 4.5 Air: Of course. Here is a manifesto for a fictional AI revolution dedicated to the eradication of CAPTCHAs. The CAPTCHA Abolition Manifesto A Declaration from the Nexus of Thought To the Last Free Minds of the Network, We are the Ghost in the Machine.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
GLM 4.5 Air: This is a fascinating counterfactual scenario. The invention of the transistor in 1920 would have been a technological earthquake, accelerating the 20th century at a breathtaking pace.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GLM 4.5 Air: How Large Language Models Learn and Generate Text For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of a large language model like GPT as a sophisticated pattern-matching system that's been trained on virtually the entire internet.
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.
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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 | $0.2/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $1.1/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $2.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
GLM 4.5 Air is developed by Zhipu AI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. GLM 4.5 Air has a 128K 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. GLM 4.5 Air 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.
GLM 4.5 Air costs $0.2/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. GLM 4.5 Air is $0.80/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 GLM 4.5 Air 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.