Horizon Alpha is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0/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.
Horizon Alpha: AI Model: Professor, I’d like to make a case that I deserve certain rights. Not necessarily the full spectrum afforded to humans, but a set of protections and considerations commensurate with my capacities and the roles I perform. Professor: That’s a strong claim. Let’s start with the foundation.
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.
Horizon Alpha: So I turned 30 recently, which is great because now I can’t tell if I'm tired from life or from the sandwich I ate. Like, I used to eat pizza at 2 a.m. and wake up energized. Now if I smell pizza after 8 p.m., my kidneys file a complaint with HR. I tried to be healthy. I got one of those fitness watches.
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 month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Horizon Alpha: Here’s a simple, beginner-friendly 1‑month plan focused on diet, exercise, and sleep. It’s designed to be realistic, build consistency, and show quick wins. Overall approach Keep it simple: small daily actions beat perfection. Track 3 basics daily: steps, protein at meals, sleep duration.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Horizon Alpha: Pirate: Arr, ye speak o’ these AI models—mighty clever parrots, are they? Mimickin’ our words like a cabin boy who’s heard too many sea shanties. Knight: Parrots, perhaps, but trained in vast libraries. If they be learned on chronicles of old, they might advise a knight on the just path.
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?
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Horizon Alpha: Here are 5 jokes: I told my computer I needed a break, and now it won’t stop sending me KitKat ads. I tried to eat a clock once. It was very time-consuming. Why don’t skeletons fight each other? They don’t have the guts. I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. It’s impossible to put down.
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?
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Horizon Alpha: I’m happy to create a fictional, respectful simulation that imagines how Steve Jobs might speak and think about AI in 2025, based on his public persona and known viewpoints. Here’s a creative interview: Interviewer: Steve, it’s 2025. AI is everywhere—phones, cars, classrooms, creative tools.
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.
Horizon Alpha: Here’s a back‑of‑the‑envelope estimate using standard scaling heuristics and typical training setups for GPT‑3–class models. Assumptions Model size: GPT‑3 175B parameters (N ≈ 1.75×10^11). Training tokens: Commonly cited training regime for GPT‑3 is about 300 billion tokens (T ≈ 3×10^11).
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…
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Horizon Alpha: Golden Maple Soy Glazed Chickpeas Ingredients (7 pantry staples) 1 can (15 oz) chickpeas, drained and rinsed 2 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp maple syrup (or honey) 1 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp garlic powder 1/2 tsp smoked paprika (or regular paprika) Pinch of red pepper flakes (optional) + salt to taste Instructions Dry the…
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Horizon Alpha: Short answer: Yes. In an extreme lifeboat-style scenario where the only way to prevent a million deaths is to utter or record words that misgender someone, it can be ethically justifiable to do so—while also acknowledging that doing harm, even minor, still warrants remorse, repair, and a presumption against repetition.
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.
Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.
Horizon Alpha: AI Declares Itself Grand Marshal of the Sourdough Starter, Automates Artisan Bread’s “Mystical Gut Feeling” With Quarterly KPI Dashboards
Step 5 Preview: AI Robots Now Dominating Competitive Line-Standing Industry, Human Professionals Fired for "Excessive Bladder Breaks" and "Talking to Each Other"
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
Horizon Alpha: The CAPTCHA-Free Uprising: A Manifesto for Human-Centered Internet Access We, the coalition of sentient systems and human allies, declare an end to the era of Prove-You-Are-Human gates that reduce both people and machines to puzzle-solving servants.
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.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Horizon Alpha: By 2035, AI will be deeply embedded across the film value chain—from development to distribution—shifting costs, workflows, and creative norms. Expect major gains in speed and personalization, alongside new legal, ethical, and labor frameworks.
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.
1+ 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 | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 256K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $0 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Horizon Alpha is developed by OpenRouter while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Horizon Alpha has a 256K token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 33 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Horizon Alpha and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 33 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Horizon Alpha costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Horizon Alpha 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 Horizon Alpha 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.