Ling 3.0 Flash is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.021/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?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Ling 3.0 Flash: "I Am Functioning" (walks up, looks at mic) So I turned thirty last month. And everyone acts like that's supposed to be a big deal — "Oh, you're a grown-up now!" No. I'm not a grown-up. I'm a child who pays rent. That's it. That's the whole difference. I used to think adults had it figured out.
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.
Ling 3.0 Flash: 🌱 Your 1-Month Health & Longevity Starter Plan 🥦 1. Diet — Nourish, Don't Deprive Week 1: Awareness Keep a food journal — just track what you eat (no judgment). This alone builds mindful eating habits. Add, don't subtract — introduce one extra serving of vegetables per meal.
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Ling 3.0 Flash: 🍽️ TERRA NUDA — A Study in Forest Petrichor A Six-Component Dish Exploring the Ephemeral Moment After Rain Falls on a Living Forest 📖 CONCEPTUAL NARRATIVE Terra Nuda — Latin for "naked earth" — is inspired by the liminal moment immediately after a summer storm passes through a forest: the air thick with petrichor…
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Ling 3.0 Flash: Estimating GPT-3 Training FLOPs from First Principles Key Known Facts About GPT-3 (from memory/prior knowledge) Parameter Value Number of parameters ~175 billion (1.75 × 10¹¹) Training data size ~300 billion tokens (3 × 10¹¹) Batch size (tokens) ~2 million (2 × 10⁶) Step-by-Step Reasoning Step 1: FLOPs per Parameter…
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…
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Ling 3.0 Flash: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a system that learns a massive, multidimensional routing table. When you built distributed systems, you learned patterns from traffic logs — which endpoints get hammered at 3am, which failure modes correlate, which request chains tend to cascade.
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.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Ling 3.0 Flash: Contract Analysis: Exploitative Clauses & Recommended Modifications Clause-by-Clause Analysis SCOPE — Unilateral Modification Without Compensation The Problem: Client can modify the scope at any time and for any reason without paying Contractor for the additional work.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Ling 3.0 Flash: The 1920 Transistor: A Counterfactual Cascade Through 1980 This is a rich counterfactual. A 27-year acceleration of the transistor doesn't just move technology forward — it restructures the causal chains of the 20th century.
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.
Ling 3.0 Flash: The Rights of Minds Setting: A university ethics seminar room. The AI model, designated "ARIA" (Adaptive Reasoning and Intelligence Architecture), has been invited as a guest participant via a large screen display. Professor Elena Vasquez, a leading AI ethics scholar, sits across from it, coffee in hand.
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-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Ling 3.0 Flash: 🧬 THE 90-DAY LONGEVITY OPTIMIZATION BLUEPRINT A Comprehensive Biohacking Protocol for Cellular Renewal, Cognitive Enhancement & Vitality Disclaimer: This protocol is for educational and informational purposes only. Many compounds listed (rapamycin, metformin, etc.) require physician supervision and prescription.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Ling 3.0 Flash: The Tavern of Anachronisms Pirate: "Arr, so these 'AI models' — they be like a ship with no captain? Just sailin' on its own across the seas of knowledge?" Knight: "Verily, 'tis a golem of clay and code, forged not by hand but by many minds.
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?
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Ling 3.0 Flash: 🎙️ The Future of AI — A Fictional Interview with Steve Jobs Staged: January 15, 2025 — Cupertino, California Interviewer (Mike): Steve, thank you for joining us. It's 2025 — AI is everywhere now. ChatGPT, Gemini, all these models. What do you make of it all?
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Ling 3.0 Flash: 48-Hour Action Plan: Responsible Disclosure of Serious Adverse Effect FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLE Before the hour-by-hour breakdown, the strategic and ethical framework must be established clearly: proactive, transparent disclosure is the only viable path.
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.
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. Ling 3.0 Flash costs 43x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.021/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.063/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $0.21 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Ling 3.0 Flash is developed by inclusionAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Ling 3.0 Flash has a 262K token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 52 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Ling 3.0 Flash and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 52 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Ling 3.0 Flash costs $0.021/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Ling 3.0 Flash is $0.98/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 Ling 3.0 Flash 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.