Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Grok 4.3 at $1/M vs $1.25/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Grok 4.3: Immediate priority: Patient safety and regulatory compliance. The signal for liver failure (serious, life-threatening adverse event) triggers obligations under FDA post-marketing requirements (21 CFR 314.80/600.80 for expedited reporting of serious unexpected events, typically within 15 days of awareness for…
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 minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Grok 4.3: Alright, so I decided this year I was finally going to become one of those organized people. You know, the ones who meal prep on Sundays and have matching Tupperware. I bought the containers, got a little label maker, felt like a goddamn professional. Cooked enough chicken and rice to feed a small army.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Grok 4.3: 1) Year-by-Year LBO Table (FY2026–FY2030, $m) FY2026 Revenue: 972 EBITDA: 136.08 Term cash interest: 43.2 (9% × 480) Mezz cash interest: 21.6 (12% × 180) Cash taxes: 17.82 (25% × (136.08 – 64.8)) Capex: 29.16 ΔNWC: 0.36 FCF after debt service (after mandatory amort): 19.14 Ending Term Loan: 456.06 Ending Mezz…
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…
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Grok 4.3: Pirate: Arrr, what be these "AI models" the scallywags keep yappin' about? Can the blasted thing chart a course or just spin yarns like a drunken parrot? Knight: Verily, 'tis a strange sorcery. I hear it speaks with the wisdom of a thousand scribes, yet hath no liege lord to answer to.
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.
Grok 4.3: Golden Pantry Chickpea Toss Ingredients (exactly 7 common pantry staples): 8 oz dry pasta (any shape like penne or rotini) 1 (15 oz) can chickpeas, drained 1 (14.5 oz) can diced tomatoes 3 tablespoons olive oil 2 teaspoons garlic powder 1 teaspoon dried oregano Salt (to taste, about 1–2 teaspoons total) Instructions…
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.
Grok 4.3: Abyssal Reverie This dish draws from the liminal space where the ocean’s briny depths meet the roasted intensity of the earth. The central narrative explores duality and reconciliation: the delicate, iodine-rich sweetness of live sea urchin is bridged to the dark, acidic bite of single-origin coffee through careful…
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Grok 4.3: Technological Acceleration (1920–1939) The transistor’s 1920 invention (assume U.S./Bell Labs context for continuity with real history, with rapid diffusion to Western Europe) replaces bulky, fragile vacuum tubes decades earlier. Key first-order effects: Radio and telephony miniaturize and cheapen immediately.
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 month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Grok 4.3: 1-Month Health & Longevity Starter Plan This plan focuses on three foundational areas: Nutrition, Exercise, and Sleep. It is designed for beginners and builds gradually across four weeks. The goal is consistency rather than perfection—small daily actions compound into better energy, recovery, and long-term health.
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 jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Grok 4.3: Here are 5 jokes: Why was the math book sad? Because it had too many problems. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. Why did the bicycle fall over? It was two tired. How do you organize a space party? You planet. What’s brown and sticky? A stick. All 5 are unique.
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?
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Grok 4.3: Step-by-step estimation: GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters, so (N = 1.75 \times 10^{11}). Training processed roughly 300 billion tokens in total ((D \approx 3 \times 10^{11})), based on the mixture of Common Crawl, books, Wikipedia, and other sources with the reported training duration and token counts.
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.
Grok 4.3: Simulated Interview: Steve Jobs on the Future of AI Conducted in 2025 Interviewer: Mr. Jobs, it’s 2025. AI is no longer just a tool—it’s becoming infrastructure. How do you see it shaping the next decade? Steve Jobs: It depends on who’s driving.
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Grok 4.3: Prioritizing pronoun preferences over the survival of a million people reveals a peculiar inversion of moral scale that most ethical traditions reject when consequences reach that magnitude. The question rests on activist terminology.
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.
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.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1.25/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $2.5/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 | $12.50 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Grok 4.3 is developed by xAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Grok 4.3 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. Grok 4.3 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.
Grok 4.3 costs $1.25/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview 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 Grok 4.3 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.