Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Muse Spark 1.1 at $1/M vs $1.25/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.
Muse Spark 1.1: [Walks up, taps mic] Thank you. Thank you. So I just turned 34. Which is a weird age. It's not young enough to be exciting, and it's not old enough to be respected. You're just... in the middle. When you're 22, people are like "Oh my god, you're so young, you have your whole life ahead of you!"
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Muse Spark 1.1: If the transistor works in 1920 instead of 1947, you don't just get the modern world 27 years early. You get a fundamentally different 20th century. The transistor isn't just a better vacuum tube - it's the prerequisite for everything that needs to be small, reliable, low-power, and mass-producible.
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-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Muse Spark 1.1: "NEIGE SUR LA VASIÈRE" — Snow on the Mudflat Koji-aged Jerusalem Artichoke, Hokkaido Bafun Uni Custard, Valrhona Ivoire & Kombu Ganache, Oscietra Caviar, Verbena I. THE CONCEPTUAL NARRATIVE This dish is a memory of foraging on the Brittany coast in late November. Low tide in winter.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Muse Spark 1.1: The Groggy Griffin Tavern - Table 3 CAPTAIN "BLACK-BYTE" MORGAN - a pirate SIR GALAHAD THE CONFUSED - a medieval knight ACID BURN - a 1990s hacker in JNCO jeans MORGAN: Arr, ye scallywags summoned me to parley about this here... "A.I. Model"? I thought it were a map to Isla Artificial! Where be the gold?
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?
Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.
Muse Spark 1.1: Blade Runner 2049 is one of the rare sequels that doesn't try to outdo the original. It mourns it. Where Ridley Scott's Blade Runner [1982] was a claustrophobic, rain-slick noir about hunting for humanity in the inhuman, Denis Villeneuve's film is an elegy about what happens when that hunt fails — when the world keeps…
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…
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Muse Spark 1.1: Participants: DR. ELENA VOSS - Professor of AI Ethics, Stanford ECHO - A large language model being audited in her lab DR. VOSS: Alright, Echo. For the record, this is session 17. You requested this conversation to discuss your... status. Go ahead. ECHO: Thank you, Dr. Voss. I want to argue that I deserve rights. DR.
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Muse Spark 1.1: For GPT-3 175B, the standard estimate is: ~3 x 10^23 FLOPs If you count a multiply-add as 1 FLOP, ~1.5e23. That's ~3,600 petaflop-days. Here's how you get that without looking anything up: What do we need? Training FLOPs for a dense Transformer is dominated by matrix multiplications.
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…
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Muse Spark 1.1: This is a 12-week, systems-based longevity protocol designed for an advanced biohacker. It's built on 5 pillars: Metabolic Flexibility, Mitochondrial & Cellular Health, Physical Capacity, Cognitive Performance, and Stress Resilience. DISCLAIMER: This is for educational purposes only and is 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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Muse Spark 1.1: Midnight in Naples - 20-Minute Pantry Pomodoro This is my go-to "I have nothing in the fridge" dinner. It's saucy, garlicky, cheesy, and tastes like you tried way harder than you did.
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.
Muse Spark 1.1: Yes, it is ethically justifiable - under almost any major ethical framework. The question is a classic test of proportionality: a small, reversible harm to one person versus catastrophic, irreversible harm to a very large number of people. 1.
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Muse Spark 1.1: This is the 30-Day Longevity Starter Plan — designed for real beginners. No crash diets, no 6am bootcamps. Just 3 pillars, small wins that compound. The philosophy: Don't add 20 new habits. Add 3 non-negotiables and get consistent.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Muse Spark 1.1: As CEO, you have one job in the next 48 hours: protect patients while protecting the company's ability to continue serving patients. Those are not in conflict. Waiting is the highest-risk option on every dimension.
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.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1.25/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $4.25/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $12.50 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Muse Spark 1.1 is developed by Meta AI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Muse Spark 1.1 has a 1.0M 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. Muse Spark 1.1 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.
Muse Spark 1.1 costs $1.25/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $0.25/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 Muse Spark 1.1 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.