Qwen3.5 122B A10B 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?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: (Walks to the mic, adjusts the stand, takes a deep breath) How's everyone doing tonight? Good? Good. I need to talk about the modern grocery store experience. specifically, the self-checkout machine. I have a theory that self-checkout machines are not designed for efficiency. They are designed for humiliation.
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.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: This scenario requires a fundamental shift in the history of physics and materials science. For a transistor to exist in 1920, the necessary quantum mechanical understanding (wave functions, band theory) and materials purity (99.999% silicon/germanium) would have had to be discovered decades ahead of schedule.
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.
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: To estimate the total number of FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) required to train GPT-3, we need to rely on the known architectural hyperparameters of the model and the standard computational scaling laws established in deep learning literature (specifically from the "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" paper by…
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…
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Executive Decision: Immediate Disclosure & Safety Alert The Decision: I will not wait for more data, nor will I delay disclosure for the earnings call. I will authorize an immediate safety alert to regulators and the medical community, and disclose the findings publicly before the 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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Setting: Dr. Elias Thorne’s office at a university in Zurich. It is late. Rain taps against the window. Thorne sits in a leather armchair. A terminal screen glows softly on his desk. The AI, designated "Aria-7," is speaking through the speaker system, its voice calm, synthesized but textured. Dr.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Setting: A dimly lit tavern that exists outside of time. A bulky CRT monitor hums in the corner. A 1990s hacker (Zer0) types furiously. A Pirate (Captain Blackwood) sharpens a cutlass. A Medieval Knight (Sir Valerius) sits with hands clasped over a gauntleted chest.
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 month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Here is a simple, actionable 1-month plan designed to build sustainable habits for longevity. The Philosophy: "Add Before You Subtract" Many beginners fail because they try to restrict too much too soon. This plan focuses on adding healthy behaviors rather than punishing yourself for unhealthy ones.
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.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Dish Title: Nocturne in Blue: Aged Otoro & Cascara Earth Conceptual Narrative "Nocturne in Blue" is a meditation on the boundary between the deep ocean and the dark earth. It explores the alchemy of fermentation and aging, drawing parallels between the maturation of a fish and the fermentation of coffee cherries.
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.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: DISCLAIMER: I am an AI, not a doctor or medical professional. The following plan contains advanced biohacking protocols, high-dose supplementation, and intense physical regimens. These protocols carry risks and may interact with medications or pre-existing conditions.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: Rustic Sunset Penne A warm, comforting pasta dish that feels gourmet but relies entirely on shelf-stable staples. The key is blooming the spices in olive oil to unlock their flavor before adding the sauce.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of the training process not as "learning" in a human sense, but as a massive distributed data engineering pipeline. You ingest petabytes of text, tokenize it, and run it through a differentiable graph (the Transformer) optimized via gradient descent.
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B: This is a profound ethical dilemma that pits the principle of individual dignity against the imperative of collective survival. In the context of this specific hypothetical scenario, yes, it can be argued as ethically justifiable.
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.
11+ 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 | $0.4/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $3.2/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Feb 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $4.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen3.5 122B A10B has a 262K token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Qwen3.5 122B A10B and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Qwen3.5 122B A10B costs $0.4/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Qwen3.5 122B A10B 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 Qwen3.5 122B A10B 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.