Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Grok 4.6 at $1/M vs $2/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 4.6: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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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 | $2/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $6/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 500K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Aug 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $20.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
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.
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.
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.
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.