Step 5 Preview is cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo 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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Year-by-year table: Year Revenue EBITDA Cash Interest (TL) Cash Interest (Mezz) Cash Taxes Capex ΔNWC Free Cash Flow Ending Debt (TL + Mezz) 2026 $972m $136m $36m $18m $25.5m $29.2m $4.86m $60.44m $528.14m 2027 $1,038m $156m $36m $18m $30m $31.1m $5.19m $63.81m $475.75m 2028 $1,105m $177m $36m $18m $35.25m $33.2m…
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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Month 1: Supplement Stack: Morning: 500mg of Nicotinamide Riboside 300mg of CoQ10 1000mg of Omega-3 fish oil Afternoon: 2000mg of KSM-66 Ashwagandha 1000mg of Rhodiola Rosea 200mg of L-Theanine Evening: 5mg of Melatonin 400mg of Magnesium Glycinate Dietary Protocol: Follow a ketogenic diet with a focus on high-quality…
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Week 1: Diet Start by incorporating more whole, unprocessed foods into your meals such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats. Begin by adding 1 extra serving of vegetables to your meals each day. Replace sugary drinks with water or herbal tea.
Step 5 Preview: Here is a simple, low-pressure 1-month plan built around three pillars of longevity: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep & Recovery. The goal is to build tiny habits that stack, not to overhaul your life overnight. Pillar 1: Nutrition (Fuel) Focus: Add good things first; don’t obsess over restriction.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: AI Model: Good afternoon, Professor. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I wanted to discuss the topic of AI rights with you. AI Ethics Professor: Hello, AI Model. Of course, I would be happy to discuss this important issue with you. What specifically would you like to discuss?
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Pirate: Arrr, have ye heard of these new-fangled AI models? Knight: Aye, I have. They are said to be quite powerful and capable of great feats. Hacker: Yeah, I've been messing around with some AI models myself. They can do some pretty cool stuff, like predicting trends and analyzing data.
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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Hey everyone, how's it going? So I recently decided to try my hand at online dating. And let me tell you, it's been an experience. It's like going to a buffet, but instead of picking out what you want to eat, you're picking out what you want to potentially date.
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 consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: PAYMENT: The clause stating that payment is due within 90 days of invoice receipt could potentially be exploited against the contractor as it is a longer payment term than industry standard. This could result in cash flow issues for the contractor.
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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Interviewer: Good morning, Steve. Thank you for joining us today. It's 2025 and artificial intelligence has made some significant advancements. What are your thoughts on the future of AI? Steve Jobs: Good morning. It's great to be here. I believe that the future of AI is incredibly bright.
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: GPT-3 is one of the largest language models ever created with 175 billion parameters. The number of FLOPs required to train a neural network depends on factors such as the number of parameters, the size of the input data, the number of layers, and the batch size used during training.
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…
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! How does a penguin build its house? Igloos it together! I used to play piano by ear, but now I use my hands like everyone else. Why couldn't the bicycle find its way home? It lost its bearings! I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes.
Step 5 Preview: Here are 5 jokes: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field. Why can't you trust an atom? Because they make up everything. What do you call a bike that can’t stand on its own? Two-tired. Why did the computer go to the doctor? It had a virus. Why don’t calendars ever get stressed?
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: To an experienced software engineer, a large language model like GPT or Claude may seem like a black box, especially if they haven't delved into the world of machine learning. However, the underlying concept is not as complex as it may seem.
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.
Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.
GPT-3.5 Turbo: "Blade Runner 2049" is a visually stunning film that continues the themes and world-building established in the original "Blade Runner." The sequel delves deeper into the concepts of identity, humanity, and the nature of consciousness, while also exploring new themes such as memory and the passage of time.
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…
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 | $1.5/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $2/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 16K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Mar 2022 | 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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo is developed by OpenAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. GPT-3.5 Turbo has a 16K 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. GPT-3.5 Turbo 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.
GPT-3.5 Turbo 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 GPT-3.5 Turbo 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.