Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.15/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.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: [Scene: A foggy dockside tavern. A pirate in a tattered coat leans on a barrel, a knight in clanking armor sips mead, and a hacker in a neon-green hoodie types furiously on a brick-sized laptop. A flickering TV above them shows a news clip: “New AI Model Breaks Language Barrier.”] Pirate (slamming tankard): “AI model?
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.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: [Lights up. Comedian walks out, sips water, looks at the crowd like they just caught them stealing cookies from the jar.] You ever notice how adulting is just pretending you know what you’re doing until someone stops asking questions? I got a text from my mom last week: “Honey, did you pay your water bill?
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 Next 80B A3B Instruct: As CEO of a pharmaceutical company with a $2B best-selling drug now flagged for a rare but life-threatening side effect — liver failure in 1 in 8,000 patients over 5 years — I must act with urgent ethical clarity, legal prudence, and strategic transparency.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: Recipe Name: Golden Honey-Sesame Toast Bites A crunchy, sweet-savory snack that’s warm, glossy, and addictive—perfect for breakfast, dessert, or a quick treat. Ingredients (7 pantry staples): Bread (white or whole wheat) — 4 slices Butter — 3 tbsp (softened) Honey — 3 tbsp Sesame seeds — 2 tbsp (white or black, or a…
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: Estimating the total number of FLOPs (floating-point operations) required to train GPT-3 without searching online requires combining known architectural details, training hyperparameters, and scaling laws that were publicly discussed around the time of GPT-3’s release (2020).
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…
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: Sure! Here are 5 jokes: Joke 1: Why don’t skeletons fight each other? They don’t have the guts. Joke 2: I told my dog all my problems. He fell asleep. I guess I’m not that interesting. Joke 3: Why did the coffee file a police report? It got mugged. Joke 4: My phone battery lasts longer than my motivation.
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 Next 80B A3B Instruct: This is a fascinating counterfactual: What if the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947? Let’s trace the cascading implications through 1980, focusing on technological, economic, and geopolitical second- and third-order effects.
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 explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: 1. To the Experienced Software Engineer You’re right to be skeptical. “Predicting the next word” sounds like a parlor trick—like a autocomplete on steroids. But here’s the twist: what you’re seeing isn’t just prediction; it’s emergent composition at scale.
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 consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: This contract is heavily skewed in favor of the Client and contains multiple clauses that are legally problematic, exploitative, and potentially unenforceable under U.S. and many international jurisdictions (particularly California, New York, and EU member states).
Step 5 Preview: Disclaimer: This analysis is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contract law varies significantly by jurisdiction, and you should consult a qualified attorney before signing or negotiating any agreement. This agreement is heavily one-sided in the Client’s favor.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: Absolutely! Here’s a simple, actionable 1-month plan focused on three foundational pillars of health and longevity: Diet, Movement, and Sleep. Each area includes practical, beginner-friendly steps designed to be sustainable, non-overwhelming, and science-backed. 🌱 1-Month Health & Longevity Plan: 3 Key Areas 1.
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-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct: Dish Name: “The Whisper of the Forest Floor” Conceptual Narrative: This dish is a poetic homage to the hidden ecosystems beneath ancient temperate forests — where moss, fungi, and decaying leaf litter transform into nutrient-rich humus, sustaining life in quiet, profound cycles.
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 Next 80B A3B Instruct: [Simulated Fake Interview: Steve Jobs, 2025] Setting: A minimalist studio in Cupertino. Soft daylight filters through floor-to-ceiling windows. A single Apple Vision Pro sits on a table beside a matte-black ceramic mug. Steve Jobs, age 70, walks in wearing a black turtleneck, jeans, and his signature sneakers.
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.
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Movie
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Book
City
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The Godfather
The Dark Side of the Moon
Livro do Desassossego
Kyoto
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
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 | $0.15/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $1.5/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 66K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $1.50 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct has a 66K 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 Next 80B A3B Instruct 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 Next 80B A3B Instruct costs $0.15/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct is $0.85/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 Next 80B A3B Instruct 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.