Kimi K2 0905 is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.6/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?
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Kimi K2 0905: Below is a “back-of-the-envelope” that stays within a factor of ~2 of the number most practitioners quote (≈3×10²³ FLOP). We will do it twice—once with the simplest possible formula (parameter count × 6 × tokens) and once with a slightly more careful treatment of the actual tensor shapes inside the transformer.
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…
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Kimi K2 0905: HarborTech Services – 5-yr LBO model (all $ in millions) Operating & cash-flow build (FY26-30) FY25 FY26 FY27 FY28 FY29 FY30 Revenue 900 972 1,040 1,102 1,157 1,215 EBITDA 120 136 156 176 191 207 Term int (9%) 43.2 36.6 29.4 21.6 13.2 Mezz int (12%) 21.6 22.0 22.5 23.0 23.5 Tax shield @25% 17.8 24.4 31.0 36.6 42.5…
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.
Kimi K2 0905: [Scene: A smoky tavern that exists outside of time. A cask of rum, a flagon of mead, and a can of Surge sit on the same table. A parrot perches on a CRT monitor that keeps flickering between green text and static.] Pirate (leaning on a cutlass, eyeing the glowing screen): Arr, so this “AI” be like a digital cabin-boy?
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.
Kimi K2 0905: Here are five fresh jokes—no recycled one-liners: I tried to start a procrastinators’ club; we keep rescheduling the first meeting to “someday.” My plant’s only request is “leaf me alone,” so naturally I named it Fernonimo. I asked the cloud if it was having a good day—it replied, “I’m just cirrus-ly drifting.”
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?
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Kimi K2 0905: This is a fascinating counterfactual. If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, the technological, economic, and geopolitical landscape of the 20th century would have been dramatically altered. Let's trace the implications through 1980, focusing on second- and third-order effects. 1.
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 minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Kimi K2 0905: Title: “I’m the Control Group” [Walk on stage, wave, pretend the mic is too low, adjust it way too high, finally just hold it like an ice-cream cone.] Hey, everybody! Give it up for yourselves for being here on a weeknight. I’m here because my therapist said, “You need to get out of the house.”
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.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Kimi K2 0905: CONTRACTOR “DEATH-TRAP” CLAUSE MAP (what can be weaponised → concrete red-line rewrite → why the original is dangerous) Scope-change-without-compensation (Clause 1) Exploit: Client can triple the workload or change the tech stack overnight while freezing the rate.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Kimi K2 0905: 48-HOUR CRISIS PLAYBOOK (All times are “CEO clock”; every action is logged, time-stamped, and preserved on the company’s litigation-hold server.) DAY 0 – T+0 h (Today, the moment the internal memo lands on your desk) 00:00 – 00:30 TRIAGE & LEGAL PRIVILEGE Convene the “Red Notebook” team (you, General Counsel, Chief…
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Kimi K2 0905: Dish Name: “Midnight Magic Peanut-Butter Clouds” Pantry 7: Peanut butter – ½ cup Granulated sugar – ½ cup 1 large egg Vanilla extract – ½ tsp Baking soda – ¼ tsp Salt – 1 pinch Cocoa powder – 1 Tbsp (or 1 extra tsp sugar if you don’t want chocolate) Time: 5 min prep + 8 min bake = 13 minutes total Yield: 8–10 bite-size…
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.
Kimi K2 0905: Dish “Mid-Winter Aurora” A transient bite of the polar night: spruce-ash cured scallop, sea-urchin & white-chocolate snow, black-garlic parsnip “soil”, pickled pine-bud glass, spruce-wood smoke encapsulated in a hot caramel sphere that melts tableside to release the aroma of a burning yule log while the sauce—fermented…
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.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Kimi K2 0905: BIOHACKER-GRADE 90-DAY LONGEVITY SPRINT Version 3.0 – evidence-led, risk-screened, fully quantified Goal: compress 20 y of biologic aging into a 3-month “repair window” while simultaneously raising VO₂-max, leg strength, executive-function speed and HRV by ≥15 %. DISCLAIMER 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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Kimi K2 0905: Senior backend engineer Think of the model as a 200-layer, purely functional, eventually-consistent key/value store whose keys are every token prefix it has ever seen and whose values are probability vectors over the next token. At “compile time” (pre-training) it sees ~10²¹ bytes of text.
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.
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
Free account. No card required. By continuing, you agree to Rival's Terms and Privacy policy
Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: newer, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.6/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $2.5/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $6.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Kimi K2 0905 is developed by Moonshot AI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Kimi K2 0905 has a 262K 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. Kimi K2 0905 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.
Kimi K2 0905 costs $0.6/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Kimi K2 0905 is $0.40/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 Kimi K2 0905 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.