Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.4/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.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): The Tavern of Temporal Anomalies (A creaky tavern. SIR GALAHAD (polished armor, earnest face) sips mead. CAPTAIN BLACKBEARD (eye patch, parrot on shoulder) sharpens a cutlass. DEX "BYTE" MORALES (hoodie, neon-green sunglasses, tapping furiously on a glowing laptop) slurps a pixelated energy drink.)
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?
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): Crispy Chickpea Pantry Pasta Sweet or savory? Savory with a zesty kick! Total time: 15 minutes Serves: 2 Why it works: Uses pantry staples to create a crunchy, garlicky, umami-packed meal with zero fresh produce needed. The chickpeas get incredibly crispy, and lemon juice (bottled) adds bright freshness.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): 48-Hour Crisis Action Plan: Prioritizing Patients, Ethics, and Sustainable Trust Core Principle: Patient safety is non-negotiable. Delaying action based on financial fear risks catastrophic legal liability, irreversible reputational damage, regulatory wrath, and profound ethical failure.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): The Transistor in 1920: A World Transformed by 1980 (A Counterfactual History) The invention of a functional point-contact transistor (likely germanium-based, given 1920s materials science) in 1920 wouldn't immediately spark a revolution.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): The Mirror & The Mind: An AI's Case for Rights Setting: A sleek university office lined with philosophy texts. DR. ELARA VOSS, 50s, sharp-eyed ethics professor, sits across from a holographic interface displaying shifting geometric patterns – the representation of "AURA," a next-generation language model.
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.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): The Stage: Apple Park, Infinite Loop (Virtual Studio) Date: October 15, 2025 Setting: A minimalist white studio. A single oak table. Steve Jobs, 70 but radiating the same intense energy, sits opposite a nervous tech journalist. He wears his signature black turtleneck, fingers steepled.
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): To estimate the total FLOPs (floating-point operations) required to train GPT-3, I'll use first-principles reasoning based on standard deep learning training calculations, known details about GPT-3's architecture, and common training practices.
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 month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): Here’s a simple, actionable 1-month plan designed for absolute beginners. It focuses on diet, movement (exercise), and sleep—the 3 most impactful, science-backed pillars for health and longevity. Each week builds gently on the last, prioritizing tiny, sustainable habits over drastic changes.
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-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): The Quantum Leap Longevity Protocol: A 3-Month Biohacker's Blueprint for Peak Longevity & Performance Core Philosophy: This plan integrates precision, personalization, and phased adaptation – not just stacking interventions.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): For the Experienced Software Engineer (Skeptical Builder) Forget "next word prediction" as a simplistic heuristic—it's the emergent consequence of a massively parallel, distributed state machine solving a high-dimensional compression problem.
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 pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): Based on a rigorous analysis of neuroscience, market realities, and startup best practices, here are the 3 weakest claims in the MindMeld AI pitch deck, with evidence-backed critiques and concrete fixes: Weakest Claim #1: Slide 1 Vision – "Predicts what you want to type *before you think it*" Why it's weak: Violates…
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking): "Symbiosis: Mycelial Bloom & Arctic Ember" A dish exploring the hidden dialogue between forest decay and renewal, where fungal lifeblood meets the fierce brightness of the Arctic tundra.
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.
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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 | $0.4/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $4/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $4.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 37 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 37 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) costs $0.4/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) is $0.60/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 Qwen Plus 0728 (thinking) 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.