Nemotron 3 Ultra 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?
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Setting: A smoky tavern that exists outside of time. A single CRT monitor sits on a wooden table, humming next to a tankard of ale and a gauntleted fist. Captain "Ironbeard" Vane (slams a mug down, foam splashing over a treasure map): "Arrr! So this 'Large Language Model' be a ghost in the machine, aye?
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?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: (Walk to mic, adjust stand, pause, look around the room) Opener: The "Good Evening" Lie So, the host said, "Give it up for a very funny comedian!" And I walked out here thinking, "Okay, who is it? Where are they?" Then I realized… oh no. It’s me. I hate that moment. That split second where the audience realizes, "Oh.
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.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: This is a profound "hard takeoff" scenario. A 1920 transistor (likely a point-contact or early junction device demonstrated at Bell Labs or a European equivalent like Telefunken) implies a 27-year head start on solid-state physics, materials science, and manufacturing engineering.
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.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Dish Title: Petrichor: The Memory of Dry Earth Meeting Rain Classification: Amuse-Bouche / Palate Awakener (Serves 1, scaled for service of 12) Conceptual Tier: Michelin 3-Star (Technique: Ultra-high precision, multi-sensory engagement, molecular architecture, zero-waste philosophy) I.
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.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Here are 5 jokes: Parallel lines have so much in common. It’s a shame they’ll never meet. I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised. Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. I'm reading a book on 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?
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a massively parallel, differentiable database where the "schema" is learned rather than designed. The transformer architecture is essentially a stack of attention blocks that route information across token positions — each block is a small, fixed computation…
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Dish Name: Golden Hour Chickpea Fritters Crispy, savory, and deeply golden—these come together in minutes using the "liquid gold" from the can (aquafaba) as the secret binder. No eggs, no fresh produce, pure pantry magic.
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.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: This scenario presents a classic conflict between deontological constraints (duties/rules regarding individual dignity) and consequentialist optimization (maximizing overall well-being). Ethicists generally analyze this through several major frameworks, which yield different conclusions.
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.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Architecture Analysis: Real-Time Collaborative Editor Critical Failure Modes Client-Side Timestamps for Conflict Resolution Problem: Last-write-wins uses client clocks. Clocks drift (NTP sync issues), users change system time, timezone bugs. Two simultaneous edits → arbitrary winner based on broken clocks.
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 month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: The "Foundations First" 1-Month Plan Goal: Build sustainable micro-habits in Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery without overwhelm. Focus on consistency > intensity. The 3 Pillars & Daily "Minimum Viable Habits" (MVH) Do these every single day. If you miss one, resume immediately—no guilt.
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Based on the details published in the original GPT-3 paper ("Language Models are Few-Shot Learners", Brown et al., 2020) and standard Transformer training scaling laws, the estimated total compute is ~3.14 × 10²³ FLOPs (314 ZettaFLOPs).
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…
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
Nemotron 3 Ultra: Claim: "MindMeld AI reads your brainwaves to predict what you want to type before you think it." (Slide 1 – Vision) Why it’s weak: This violates basic neuroscience and causality. Neural activity is the physical correlate of "thinking it."
Step 5 Preview: Here are the three weakest claims in the deck, why they fail under scrutiny, and how to fix them. Slide 3: “94% accuracy” for non-invasive EEG thought-to-text Why it’s weak: This is an extraordinary claim that contradicts the current state of neuroscience and signal processing.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | Yes (1 provider) | No |
| Released | Jun 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.
Nemotron 3 Ultra is developed by NVIDIA while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Nemotron 3 Ultra 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. Nemotron 3 Ultra 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.
Nemotron 3 Ultra costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Nemotron 3 Ultra 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 Nemotron 3 Ultra 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.