Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen3 Max at $1/M vs $1.2/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.
Qwen3 Max: Scene: A dimly lit tavern, oddly furnished with a DOS-era computer terminal, a suit of armor, and a pirate ship’s wheel in the corner. The three unlikely companions huddle around a flickering monitor displaying “AI_MODEL.EXE.” — Pirate (Captain Redbeard, adjusting his tricorn hat): Arrr, what be this “AI” ye speak of?
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.
Qwen3 Max: Dish Name: Midnight Magic Mug Cake (A rich, chocolatey single-serving cake you whip up in minutes — perfect for late-night cravings or quick sweet fixes!) Ingredients (7 Pantry Staples): All-purpose flour – 4 tbsp Sugar – 3 tbsp Cocoa powder – 2 tbsp Baking powder – ¼ tsp Salt – pinch Milk – 3 tbsp (dairy or…
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.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Qwen3 Max: The Chronos Protocol: A 3-Month Cutting-Edge Longevity & Performance Optimization Plan Core Philosophy: Synergistic integration of mitochondrial optimization, autophagy enhancement, epigenetic regulation, and systemic resilience through precise, data-driven 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.
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Qwen3 Max: [Stage lights up. Comedian walks out, grabs mic, squints at audience.] Alright, alright—settle down. I know, I know… you’re all thinking, “Why did I pay $18 for a drink to hear someone complain about adulting?” And honestly? Fair. I’d be mad too. But stick with me.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Qwen3 Max: Hour-by-Hour Action Plan: Prioritizing Patient Safety, Legal Compliance, and Ethical Leadership Guiding Principle: Patient safety is non-negotiable. Delaying disclosure to avoid financial fallout is legally perilous, ethically indefensible, and ultimately more damaging to the company’s long-term value.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Qwen3 Max: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of a large language model (LLM) as a massively scaled, probabilistic autocomplete system—except instead of just your last few words, it conditions predictions on everything you’ve typed so far, using a context window that can span tens of thousands of tokens.
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-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Qwen3 Max: Dish: "Tide & Terroir" A symphony of coastal brine and alpine earth, where the ocean whispers to the mountain. Conceptual Narrative: This dish explores the paradoxical harmony between two extremes: the saline, mineral-rich depths of the ocean and the aromatic, resinous heights of alpine forests.
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.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Qwen3 Max: — INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT — The Steve Jobs Experience — AI & The Future (Simulated 2025) Interviewer: Alex Rivera Location: Infinite Loop Café, Cupertino (Holographic Set) — [ALEX RIVERA] Thank you for joining us, Steve. It’s surreal — and a little uncanny — to have you here in 2025.
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.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Qwen3 Max: Here are 5 jokes: Why don’t skeletons fight each other? They don’t have the guts. I told my computer I needed a break… Now it won’t stop sending me Kit-Kats. Why did the math book look sad? It had too many problems. I asked my dog what’s two minus two. He said nothing. What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?
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?
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Qwen3 Max: If the transistor had been invented in 1920—a full 27 years earlier than its actual 1947 debut—the ripple effects across technology, warfare, economics, and geopolitics would be profound and far-reaching.
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Qwen3 Max: Absolutely! Here’s a simple, actionable 1-month plan for someone just starting their journey toward better health and longevity. We’ll focus on three foundational pillars: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep & Stress Management. Each week builds gently on the last — no overwhelm, just progress.
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.
Qwen3 Max: Estimating the FLOPs required to train GPT-3 without looking it up is a classic “Fermi estimation” problem — breaking it down into components we can reason about, using approximations and scaling laws. Let’s go step by step.
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…
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: newer, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1.2/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $6/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 256K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $12.00 | $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.
Qwen3 Max is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen3 Max has a 256K 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 Max 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 Max costs $1.2/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $0.20/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 Max 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.