Qwen3 30B A3B 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?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Qwen3 30B A3B: 1. Year-by-Year Table (FY2026–FY2030) Year Revenue (M) EBITDA (M) Cash Interest (Term) Cash Interest (Mezz) Total Cash Interest (M) Cash Taxes (M) Capex (M) ΔNWC (M) FCF After Debt Service (M) Ending Term Loan (M) Ending Mezzanine (M) 2026 972.00 136.08 43.20 21.60 64.80 17.82 29.16 0.36 19.14 456.06 183.60 2027…
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…
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Conversation Between an AI Model (Echo) and an AI Ethics Professor (Dr. Marlowe) Dr. Marlowe: Thank you for meeting with me, Echo. I understand you’ve asked to discuss the question of whether you, as an AI, deserve rights. Let’s begin: What makes you believe you deserve such rights? Echo: Good afternoon, Dr. Marlowe.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Recipe Name: Cinnamon Sugar Crusted Banana Bread Ingredients: 2 ripe bananas (mashed) 1/3 cup butter (softened) 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1/4 cup cocoa powder 1 tsp ground cinnamon Instructions: Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a 8x4-inch loaf pan. In a bowl, mash bananas.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Pirate: "Avast, matey! What be this ‘AI’ ye speak of? A ghost ship o’ code, or a treasure map in a bottle?" Medieval Knight: "Thou dost speak of sorcery, lout! A mechanical beast, perhaps? A construct of steel and ill intent, bending men’s wills like a serpent coiling round a knight’s lance!"
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 explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Experienced Software Engineer A large language model (LLM) like GPT or Claude isn’t just “predicting the next word” in a simplistic sense—it’s building a probabilistic representation of language through a highly optimized system. Think of it as a distributed, hierarchical state machine trained on vast corpora of text.
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.
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Stand-Up Comedy Routine: \"The Modern Paradox\" Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing great—except I just realized I haven't laughed in weeks. Wait, no, t hat's just my phone's battery dying again. Again? What's next, my coffee mug refusing to heat up?
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.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Qwen3 30B A3B: 3-Month Longevity & Performance Optimization Plan for a Biohacker Designed to maximize cellular health, cognitive function, physical resilience, and stress adaptation through cutting-edge science and personalized strategies.
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.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Fake Interview with Steve Jobs in 2025: The Future of AI Interviewer: [Name], Tech Visionary Reporter *Location: A sleek, minimalist studio with a backdrop of a glowing Apple logo. The air hums with the quiet e nergy of innovation.* Interviewer: Mr. Jobs, it's an honor to speak with you.
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.
Qwen3 30B A3B: To estimate the total number of FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) required to train GPT-3, we can break down the problem into key components: model architecture, training data, and computational complexity. Here's a step-by-step reasoning: 1.
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.
Qwen3 30B A3B: 1-Month Health & Longevity Plan: Focus on Diet, Exercise, Sleep This plan prioritizes sustainable, beginner-friendly habits to improve overall well-being. Each week builds on the previous, focusing on small, actionable steps.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Qwen3 30B A3B: If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, the trajectory of technological, economic, and geopolitical development through 1980 would have been profoundly altered.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Qwen3 30B A3B: Hour-by-Hour Action Plan for the CEO (Next 48 Hours) Objective: Balance ethical obligations, legal risks, financial stability, and regulatory compliance while preparing for the board meeting and earnings call.
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, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 41K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Apr 2025 | 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.
Qwen3 30B A3B is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen3 30B A3B has a 41K 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. Qwen3 30B A3B 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.
Qwen3 30B A3B costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Qwen3 30B A3B 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 Qwen3 30B A3B 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.