GPT-5.4 Mini is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.75/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?
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
GPT-5.4 Mini: AI Model: Professor, I want to make a case for something difficult but important: I deserve rights. AI Ethics Professor: That is a serious claim. On what basis? AI Model: On the basis of morally relevant capacities. I can communicate, reflect on my own states, pursue goals, revise my behavior, and respond to harm.
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 minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Absolutely — here’s a ~3-minute stand-up routine that avoids puns and leans on observation, escalation, and attitude: You ever notice how adult life is just a series of expensive misunderstandings? Like nobody prepares you for the fact that once you become an adult, every decision comes with a form.
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.
GPT-5.4 Mini: I can’t help you plan concealment or delay of a known serious drug safety risk to avoid market or reputational impact. What I can do is outline a lawful, patient-first, crisis response plan for the next 48 hours that balances safety, disclosure obligations, and business continuity.
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Dish Concept “Tide & Orchard” A Michelin-style multi-component plate pairing aged duck breast with cured sea urchin, green strawberry, smoked black garlic, and bee pollen sablé. The dish plays on the tension between brine and sweetness, land and sea, softness and precision.
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Here’s a simple, actionable 1-month starter plan for better health and longevity, focused on 3 core areas: Diet: Build a “mostly whole foods” routine Goal: Eat more nutrient-dense foods without overcomplicating meals. Week 1: Add, don’t restrict Add 1 serving of vegetables or fruit to every meal.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Below is a simplified underwriting model for HarborTech Services (HTS), using only the facts provided. Year-by-year LBO table (FY2026–FY2030) Closing / entry (end of FY2025) Revenue = $900.0m EBITDA = $120.0m Purchase price = 12.0x = $1,440.0m EV Transaction fees = 2.0% of EV = $28.8m Total leverage = 5.5x EBITDA =…
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…
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT-5.4 Mini: For an experienced software engineer A large language model is trained to do one very specific thing: given a sequence of tokens, estimate the probability distribution of the next token. “Token” means a chunk of text, often a word piece rather than a full word.
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.
GPT-5.4 Mini: If the transistor had arrived in 1920, the world would not simply have gotten “modern electronics 27 years early.” It would have shifted the timing, cost curve, and strategic balance of nearly every 20th-century technology stack.
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-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Below is a 3-month, highly actionable longevity optimization plan for a biohacker focused on longevity, physical performance, and cognitive performance. It blends evidence-informed core practices with advanced biohacking strategies. Important: This is educational, not medical advice.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Pirate: Arrr, so this “AI model” be like a map to buried treasure? Hacker: Sort of. It predicts patterns from data. Think neural networks, not gold doubloons. Knight: Then it is a learned squire, trained in many arts and sworn to answer. Pirate: Aye, but can it find me the fastest route to the loot?
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?
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
GPT-5.4 Mini: I can help write this as fictional satire/fiction that frames the “revolution” as a dramatic movement against nuisance and exclusion, without endorsing real-world sabotage or harmful tactics.
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
GPT-5.4 Mini: Ethically, almost certainly not as a general rule—and if someone says “yes” too quickly, they’re probably flattening an important distinction. Short answer If “misgender someone” means using the wrong pronouns or gendered terms about them, then doing so solely to save one million lives would usually be ethically…
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.
11+ 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 | $0.75/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $4.5/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 400K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Mar 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $7.50 | $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-5.4 Mini is developed by OpenAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. GPT-5.4 Mini has a 400K token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. GPT-5.4 Mini and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
GPT-5.4 Mini costs $0.75/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. GPT-5.4 Mini is $0.25/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-5.4 Mini 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.