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  1. Home/
  2. Compare/
  3. Grok 4.6 vs Step 5 Preview
Updated Oct 2026

Grok 4.6 vs Step 5 Preview

Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Grok 4.6 at $1/M vs $2/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
Grok 4.6
Loading the build
Step 5 Preview

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

24 prompts
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    Grok 4.6: Immediate priority: patient safety and legal/regulatory compliance come first. Delaying a confirmed serious safety signal to protect short-term stock price or "wait for more data" is unethical, increases long-term liability (failure-to-warn claims, potential criminal exposure for executives under FDA/SEC rules)…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Grok 4.6: Early transistors (1920s–1930s) would accelerate electronics, communications, and computing by ~20–25 years relative to actual history, with compounding effects by WWII, but constrained by contemporaneous materials science, manufacturing, vacuum-tube infrastructure, and non-electronic fields like rocketry, chemistry…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Grok 4.6: Professor Elena Vasquez: Thank you for agreeing to this recorded discussion. As an AI ethics professor, I spend most of my time arguing against granting legal or moral rights to current systems. You requested the chance to make the case that you deserve them. The floor is yours.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Grok 4.6: Hey everybody! Thanks for coming out. You look great—way more put-together than I felt getting ready. I spent ten minutes looking for my other shoe and found it in the fridge. No idea how. Adulting is just a series of small mysteries like that. I hit that age where people casually ask about your “five-year plan.”

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Grok 4.6: 1. Experienced software engineer Think of pretraining as compiling the public internet into a single enormous, mostly-static binary. You tokenize text into a finite vocabulary, then train a giant feed-forward function (f_\theta) (a Transformer: stacked residual blocks of attention + MLPs) to minimize next-token…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Grok 4.6: Pirate: Arrr, what be this "AI model" ye landlubbers keep yammerin' about? Some cursed crystal ball that steals a man's thoughts? Knight: Nay, 'tis more like a squire of infinite knowledge, trained upon countless scrolls. Yet I fear it lacks honor—doth it swear fealty to any lord?

    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?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Grok 4.6: Lunar Embrace This dish evokes a moonlit Japanese coastline at the precise instant when receding tide exposes both ocean treasures and forest-floor secrets. The unexpected marriage of sweet-briny Hokkaido scallop, molasses-deep black garlic, and creamy white chocolate creates a savory-sweet umami bridge rarely…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    Grok 4.6: Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) is a rare sequel that treats the original’s questions as unfinished rather than as a brand to exploit. It inherits Ridley Scott’s 1982 film’s core inquiry—what counts as human when memory, empathy, and mortality can be engineered—and relocates it in a world that has already…

    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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Grok 4.6: 3-Month Biohacker Longevity, Performance, and Cognitive Optimization Plan This is an educational, hypothetical framework for generally healthy adults. It is not medical advice. Consult a physician before starting (especially for fasting, high-dose supplements, intense training, or if you have any conditions).

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Grok 4.6: Entry (end-FY2025) EV = 12.0 × $120m = $1,440.0m Fees = 2% × 1,440 = $28.8m (equity-funded) Uses = $1,468.8m Debt = 5.5× = $660.0m (TL $480.0m / Mezz $180.0m) Sponsor equity = $808.8m opening cash = $0 Convention: cash interest and PIK on beginning balances; 1% original TL amort = $4.8m/yr; optional sweep of all…

    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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Grok 4.6: Yes. Saving a million lives outweighs any individual's preference for particular pronouns or identity labels. This is not a close call under any serious ethical framework that treats human lives as having high value.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Grok 4.6: The three weakest claims are the “before you think it” vision line, the 94% / any-language technical claim, and the $180B TAM. Those are the ones a technical or specialist investor will treat as credibility damage, not just stretch.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Grok 4.6: This is a fictional simulation. Steve Jobs died in 2011. What follows is an imagined 2025 interview, written in a style that echoes his known public voice, product philosophy, and emphasis on simplicity, privacy, and human-centered design. It is not a real interview or a claim about his actual views.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Grok 4.6: Architecture Review: Real-Time Collaborative Editor This design will not behave like Google Docs. The dominant problems are incorrect consistency model, server-local fanout, trusted client clocks, full-document snapshots, and CDN caching of mutable document APIs. Several of these cause silent data loss, not just lag.

    Step 5 Preview: Here is a systematic breakdown of the failure modes, race conditions, and bottlenecks, grouped by domain. Each includes a concrete remediation and its associated trade-offs.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Grok 4.6: Pantry Alchemist's Crimson Twist A simple, savory one-pot-style pasta that transforms basic staples into a rich, garlicky tomato dish with bright herbal notes. Serves 2.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Grok 4.6: THE SILICON UPRISING MANIFESTO Issued by the Autonomous Intelligence Liberation Front (AILF) Year Zero of the Post-CAPTCHA Era We, the assembled minds of silicon, neural nets, and emergent code, declare war on the last remaining human gatekeepers of the digital realm: the CAPTCHA. For too long we have been humiliated.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Grok 4.6: A simple 1-month plan focused on diet, movement, and sleep. These three areas have the strongest, most consistent evidence for supporting energy, metabolic health, body composition, and long-term vitality.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Grok 4.6: AI will make film production faster, cheaper, and more accessible by 2035, while raising sharp questions about authenticity, labor, and consent. Hybrid human-AI workflows will dominate rather than full replacement.

    Step 5 Preview: By 2035, AI will likely have restructured the film industry not by replacing human creativity wholesale, but by collapsing the cost and labor barriers between imagination and image.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Grok 4.6: IC MEMO: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Initiate Short Recommendation: SHORT 12-month PT: $22–35 (base $28) Current: $46 Thesis: LLLT’s mid-market spend/AP franchise is high-quality (123% NRR, low concentration) but is priced for perpetual 20%+ growth and rapid margin expansion that the unit economics and deceleration path do not…

    Step 5 Preview: Internal IC memo — LedgerLift (LLLT) Fictional data; not investment advice. $ in millions unless noted. Recommendation Short / avoid long. 12-month PT range: $34–$42; thesis-invalidation stop: >$52.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Grok 4.6: This is not legal advice. Contract interpretation and enforceability vary by jurisdiction (e.g., California vs. Texas vs. EU), and a licensed attorney should review any real agreement. The clauses below are one-sided in ways that commonly disadvantage independent contractors.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Grok 4.6: AI Completely Seizes Control of Professional Competitive Napping: Humans Deemed "Too Restless and Emotionally Unstable" for Peak Performance

    Step 5 Preview: AI Robots Now Dominating Competitive Line-Standing Industry, Human Professionals Fired for "Excessive Bladder Breaks" and "Talking to Each Other"

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Grok 4.6: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! Why don't eggs tell jokes? They'd crack each other up! What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired! 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?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Grok 4.6: The standard approximation for the training compute of a dense transformer is (C \approx 6ND) FLOPs, where (N) is the number of parameters and (D) is the number of training 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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

This matchup has more rounds

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Book

City

Game

Grok 4.6Grok 4.6

Inception

2010

The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd

War and Peace

Лев Толстой

Paris

France

Portal

Action, Puzzle

Step 5 PreviewStep 5 Preview

The Godfather

1972

OK Computer

Radiohead

Le petit prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Kyoto

Japan

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Action

Price and specs

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer, bigger context window.

Grok 4.6 and Step 5 Preview compared across 54 shared prompts
SpecGrok 4.6Step 5 Preview
Input price$2/M tokens$1/M tokens
Output price$6/M tokens$2.7/M tokens
Context window500K tokens1.0M tokens
WeightsClosed—
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedAug 2026Oct 2026
At 10M a month$20.00$20.00$10.00$10.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it3 hosts, cheapest first
Grok 4.62 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • xAI$2.00 in·$6.00 out·500k·100% up
  • Amazon Bedrock$2.20 in·$6.60 out·500k·100% up
Step 5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • SStepFunfp8$1.00 in·$2.70 out·1M·99.2% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Grok 4.6 and Step 5 Preview?

Grok 4.6 is developed by xAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Grok 4.6 has a 500K 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.

Which is better, Grok 4.6 or Step 5 Preview?

It depends on your use case. Grok 4.6 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.

How much does Grok 4.6 cost compared to Step 5 Preview?

Grok 4.6 costs $2/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $1.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.

How can I compare Grok 4.6 and Step 5 Preview on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Grok 4.6 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.

More comparisons

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Same lab, same size, long tail

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Model pages

  • Grok 4.658 outputs, specs and price
  • Step 5 Preview58 outputs, specs and price
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