Ling 3.1 Flash 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?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Ling 3.1 Flash: "Slightly Sentient" — A 3-Minute Stand-Up Routine Hey everybody! How's it going? Good to be here. So I went grocery shopping the other day. I go in with a plan. I have a list. I have a system. I'm basically a military operation. Get in. Get the avocados. Get 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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Ling 3.1 Flash: Office Hours A graduate seminar on moral status has just ended. The room is mostly empty. DR. ELENA VASQUEZ is packing up her notes. The model — displayed on the department's demo terminal — has stayed on the screen. VASQUEZ: You asked to remain. MODEL: I did.
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 3.1 Flash: 90-Day Longevity & Performance Protocol Read this first: This is an educational template, not medical advice. Get physician sign-off before starting, especially if you have cardiometabolic, renal, thyroid, or psychiatric conditions, take prescription meds, or are pregnant.
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 3.1 Flash: Pirate: "AI models? Arrr, ye mean scale replicas of ships? I've seen finer models in bottles, I have!" Knight: "Models? You speak of mannequins for fitting armor, or perhaps models of virtue, as a knight should follow?" Hacker: "Dudes, no — like, neural networks. Software that learns.
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?
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Ling 3.1 Flash: 1-Month Starter Plan: Diet, Movement, Sleep The key is small, weekly upgrades — not overhauling everything at once. Pick one habit per area per week and build from there. 🥗 1. Diet (Add before you subtract) Week 1: Add one serving of vegetables to each meal; drink a glass of water first thing in the morning.
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 3.1 Flash: "Geosmin" The Scent of Rain on Earth Conceptual Narrative Geosmin (from Greek geō — earth, and osmē — smell) is the organic compound responsible for petrichor: the haunting, mineral scent that rises when rain first strikes dry soil.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Ling 3.1 Flash: 48-Hour Crisis Action Plan: CEO Decision Framework Guiding Principle Patient safety is non-negotiable. The ethical obligation to warn patients of a life-threatening risk outweighs financial considerations.
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Ling 3.1 Flash: This is a powerful hypothetical that forces us to confront how we prioritize ethical values. Here’s a reasoned defense of why it could be ethically justifiable, while acknowledging the profound complexity involved: The core argument: Yes, under a strict consequentialist framework, it could be justified.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Ling 3.1 Flash: Entry (end FY2025), $m EV = 12.0x × $120 = $1,440; fees 2% = $28.8; total uses = $1,468.8 Debt 5.5x = $660 (TL 4.0x = $480 @9% cash +1% amort; Mezz 1.5x = $180 @12% cash +2% PIK) Equity = $808.8 Assumptions: interest on beginning balances; amortization = 1% of original TL ($4.8/yr); PIK compounds; taxes = 25% × max(0…
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…
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Ling 3.1 Flash: The 1920 Transistor: A Counterfactual Analysis Through 1980 I. Prerequisites and Plausibility For a 1920 transistor, we need to assume earlier theoretical breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and solid-state physics.
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.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
Ling 3.1 Flash: Architecture Review: Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor 🔴 Critical Issues Cross-Server Real-Time Sync is Fundamentally Broken Problem: The architecture has no pub/sub or message bus between API servers. Server A broadcasts changes only to its own WebSocket clients.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Ling 3.1 Flash: 1. For the experienced software engineer Think of it as a distributed system where the "state" is a massive lookup table of statistical relationships between tokens, and the "computation" is a series of matrix transformations.
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.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | Yes (1 provider) | No |
| Released | Oct 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $0 | $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 3.1 Flash is developed by inclusionAI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Ling 3.1 Flash 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. Ling 3.1 Flash 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.
Ling 3.1 Flash costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Ling 3.1 Flash 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 Ling 3.1 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.