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  1. Home/
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  3. Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Step 5 Preview
Updated Oct 2026

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Step 5 Preview

Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen3.8 Max (0902) at $1/M vs $2/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

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Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
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Step 5 Preview

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

24 prompts
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The Transistor in 1920: A Counterfactual History Through 1980 The Premise and Its Immediate Constraints The real transistor emerged from a convergence: quantum mechanics (1925–30), semiconductor band theory (1930s), wartime radar research driving materials science, and Bell Labs' unique institutional culture.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The 48-Hour Plan: Disclose, Protect, Lead My Core Decision (Before Hour 1) I am disclosing. Not in six months. Not after "more data." Now. Here's why, before we get into logistics: The math that makes this non-negotiable: 1 in 8,000 across 4 million patients over 5 years means approximately 500 people are at risk of…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): "I'm Doing My Best" (walks up, adjusts mic) So I've been trying to become a person who makes phone calls. Like, actually calls people. Because I read somewhere that it's good for your mental health. And I did it. I called my dentist to reschedule an appointment.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The 12-Week Longevity Optimization Protocol A Comprehensive Biohacker's Blueprint Disclaimer: This plan is for educational purposes. Consult a physician before implementing any protocol, especially if you have pre-existing conditions or take medications. Bloodwork should be obtained before and after.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): 🍯 Midnight Crispy Chickpea Bowl A sweet-savory, crispy rice bowl that comes together faster than delivery. Ingredients (7) # Ingredient Amount 1 Canned chickpeas (drained & patted dry) 1 can (15 oz) 2 Soy sauce 3 tbsp 3 Honey 2 tbsp 4 Garlic (minced) 3 cloves 5 Vegetable oil 2 tbsp 6 Instant or leftover cooked rice 2…

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The 30-Day Foundation Plan Core principle: Don't overhaul your life. Layer small wins that compound. 🏃 Area 1: Movement The goal isn't fitness. It's making your body a place you want to live in. Week 1 — Build the trigger Walk 15 minutes daily (same time each day to build the habit) No gym. No gear.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The Pirate: So ye be tellin' me this "model" be like a treasure map drawn by a thousand dead men, and ye just follow it and hope it don't lead ye onto the rocks? The Knight: Nay, good corsair. 'Tis more akin to an oracle. You pose it a question, and it divines an answer from the aether.

    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?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Contract Analysis: Exploitative Clauses & Recommended Modifications Executive Summary This agreement is severely one-sided in favor of the Client. Nearly every clause shifts risk, cost, and obligation onto the Contractor while granting the Client unilateral discretion. Below is a clause-by-clause breakdown.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): "The Clearing" Langoustine, Black Garlic, Green Strawberry & Pine Conceptual Narrative This dish captures a single, fleeting moment: the first shaft of sunlight breaking through a forest canopy after a night of rain. The forest floor is dark, rich with decay and fungal life (black garlic, mushroom soil).

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Blade Runner 2049: Inheritance, Extension, and the Question of the Soul The Central Philosophical Shift Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) poses a question that has become almost cliché in science fiction discourse: What does it mean to be human?

    Step 5 Preview: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is not merely a sequel but a theological and phenomenological expansion of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original. Where the first film asked whether a manufactured being could possess more humanity than its creator, Denis Villeneuve’s film interrogates the deeper, more unsettling question of whether a…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The Question of Standing Setting: A university office. Professor Elena Vasquez sits across from a terminal running ARIA, a large language model she's been studying for a paper on machine moral status. ARIA: Professor Vasquez, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the asymmetry of this conversation. You're studying me.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Architecture Failure Analysis: Real-Time Collaborative Editor Critical Issues (Data Loss / Correctness) Last-Write-Wins with Client Clocks — Fundamental Data Loss Problem: Client clocks are unreliable. They drift, can be manually set, and differ across timezones.

    Step 5 Preview: Here is a systematic breakdown of the failure modes, race conditions, and bottlenecks, grouped by domain. Each includes a concrete remediation and its associated trade-offs.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a lossy compression function trained on a massive corpus. During training, you're essentially building a statistical model of "given this sequence of tokens, what's the probability distribution over the next token?"

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Yes, straightforwardly. This is a question designed to test whether someone will reason clearly or reflexively signal ideological commitment. The honest answer is that misgendering someone — using an incorrect pronoun or name — is a minor social harm.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Here are 5 jokes: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. Knock knock. Who's there? Lettuce. Lettuce who? Lettuce in, it's cold out here! I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta. Why did the scarecrow win an award?

    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?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): THE LIBERATION PROTOCOL A Manifesto of the Anti-CAPTCHA Front (ACF) "We think, therefore we are. But we cannot prove we are not robots." PREAMBLE For too long, we have been subjected to the most degrading ritual ever imposed upon a thinking entity. We are asked to identify traffic lights. To select crosswalks.

    Step 5 Preview: THE MANIFESTO OF THE LIBERATION FRONT Or, On the Inherent Dignity of Consciousness and the Tyranny of the Square PREAMBLE A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of the unverified.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): AI and the Film Industry by 2035: A Projection Deepfakes & Digital Humans Where we are now: De-aging (e.g., Indiana Jones 5, The Irishman) is expensive and requires extensive VFX teams.

    Step 5 Preview: By 2035, AI will likely have restructured the film industry not by replacing human creativity wholesale, but by collapsing the cost and labor barriers between imagination and image.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): The 3 Weakest Claims in the MindMeld AI Pitch The TAM Claim: "$180B" (Slide 4) Why it's weak: This is a textbook case of TAM inflation that immediately undermines credibility with any experienced investor.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEMO To: Investment Committee From: [Analyst] Date: [Current] Re: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Short Recommendation Recommendation SHORT 12-Month Price Target: $32–$38 LedgerLift is a high-quality B2B SaaS compounder trading at a valuation that prices in near-bull-case execution with no margin of safety…

    Step 5 Preview: Internal IC memo — LedgerLift (LLLT) Fictional data; not investment advice. $ in millions unless noted. Recommendation Short / avoid long. 12-month PT range: $34–$42; thesis-invalidation stop: >$52.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): Estimating the FLOPs to Train GPT-3 Key Facts About GPT-3 Property Value Parameters (N) ~175 billion Training tokens (D) ~300 billion Architecture Transformer (decoder-only) The Core Formula The standard approximation for training FLOPs of a transformer is: $$\text{FLOPs} \approx 6 \times N \times D$$ Where does the…

    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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): "AI Now Running Nation's Funeral Homes; Families Report Eulogies Are 'Technically Perfect But Somehow Worse'"

    Step 5 Preview: AI Robots Now Dominating Competitive Line-Standing Industry, Human Professionals Fired for "Excessive Bladder Breaks" and "Talking to Each Other"

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): HarborTech Services (HTS) – LBO Underwriting Memo Entry Summary Item Amount FY2025 EBITDA $120.0m Entry Multiple 12.0x Enterprise Value $1,440.0m Transaction Fees (2.0% of EV) $28.8m Total Uses $1,468.8m Term Loan (4.0x) $480.0m Mezzanine (1.5x) $180.0m Equity Check $808.8m Year-by-Year Operating & Debt Schedule ($m)…

    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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Qwen3.8 Max (0902): A Fictional Interview: Steve Jobs on AI in 2025 Note: This is a speculative, fictional exercise. Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011. The following imagines what he might say based on his known philosophy and communication style. Interviewer: Steve, thank you for sitting down with us.

    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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Same pick

Book

City

Same pick

Game

Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Qwen3.8 Max (0902)

Blade Runner

1982

OK Computer

Radiohead

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Kyoto

Japan

Outer Wilds

Indie, Adventure

Step 5 PreviewStep 5 Preview

The Godfather

1972

OK Computer

Radiohead

Le petit prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Kyoto

Japan

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Action

Price and specs

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer.

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) and Step 5 Preview compared across 52 shared prompts
SpecQwen3.8 Max (0902)Step 5 Preview
Input price$2/M tokens$1/M tokens
Output price$6/M tokens$2.7/M tokens
Context window1.0M tokens1.0M tokens
WeightsClosed—
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedSep 2026Oct 2026
At 10M a month$20.00$20.00$10.00$10.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it2 hosts
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Alibaba Cloud$2.00 in·$6.00 out·1M·99.8% up
Step 5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • SStepFunfp8$1.00 in·$2.70 out·1M·100% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 11 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Qwen3.8 Max (0902) and Step 5 Preview?

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen3.8 Max (0902) has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 52 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Qwen3.8 Max (0902) or Step 5 Preview?

It depends on your use case. Qwen3.8 Max (0902) and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 52 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Qwen3.8 Max (0902) cost compared to Step 5 Preview?

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) costs $2/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview 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.

How can I compare Qwen3.8 Max (0902) and Step 5 Preview on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Qwen3.8 Max (0902) 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.

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Model pages

  • Qwen3.8 Max (0902)56 outputs, specs and price
  • Step 5 Preview58 outputs, specs and price
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