> Built on a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, Step 5 Preview has 600B total parameters, with 27B active per token, and supports a 1M-token context window and vision input.
> Step 5 Preview scores 44 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
> The model will be released with open weights on October 15.
I guess being Chinese company they decided to skip version 4, while also giving impression to be on the similar iteration with leading companies (claude opus 5).
I wonder if other Chinese labs like Kimi/Moonshot will follow suit.
> Without any Pokémon-specific optimization, Step 5 Preview has so far sustained progress for more than 3,000 turns and 6 million tokens of interaction. By turn 3,082, it had unlocked Cut, earned three Gym Badges, and defeated Lt. Surge. The run is now roughly one-third of the way through the main story.
Finally FireRed is being used as a benchmark again! I believe Astra can beat it in 18 hours. Not sure how that compares.
Their posisitoning is nice. Instead of saying they are cheaper and a bit less performant (in terms of intelligence), they say they are best among the cheaper and a bit less performant ones.
I regularly hit 200-300M cached reads every day on some of the models I use. It has exceeded 7-800M on a couple of occasions. At $0.04/M, that is $8-12 per day only for cached reads.
I have used Kimi 2.5 and GLM 5.3 (& 5.3 Flash). Do not need them for what I do outside of spec hardening (basically, a lot of chatting).
I tend to know exactly what I want and most of the weaker models are enough to get me there. I have mainly been using MiMo, DeepSeek V4 Flash and MuseSpark Contributor over the last month or so.
Another possible reason is that the number 4 is considered unlucky in traditional Chinese culture.
Moonshot has already teased K3.1 so not likely
K3.1 would likely be a deeper/longer post-train from K3, so that’d make sense.
It’s all marketing anyways, but that’s at least how a lot of labs have been naming things (sometimes).
> Without any Pokémon-specific optimization, Step 5 Preview has so far sustained progress for more than 3,000 turns and 6 million tokens of interaction. By turn 3,082, it had unlocked Cut, earned three Gym Badges, and defeated Lt. Surge. The run is now roughly one-third of the way through the main story.
Finally FireRed is being used as a benchmark again! I believe Astra can beat it in 18 hours. Not sure how that compares.
Their posisitoning is nice. Instead of saying they are cheaper and a bit less performant (in terms of intelligence), they say they are best among the cheaper and a bit less performant ones.
How about adding a contested historical facts benchmark?
For anyone else looking for the pricing: https://platform.stepfun.ai/docs/en/guides/pricing/details#p...
I regularly hit 200-300M cached reads every day on some of the models I use. It has exceeded 7-800M on a couple of occasions. At $0.04/M, that is $8-12 per day only for cached reads.
> At $0.04/M
Unless you meant step-3.7-flash, the input cache hits are $0.05 per mil for step-5-preview.
> $8-12 per day only for cached reads
Pretty decent "API" rates for ~500M+ tokens on Step Fun 5, a Kimi K3 / GLM 5.3 level model?
Their "Step Plan" is ridiculous, by comparison: ~$60 usage on $6.99/mo; ~$220 on $9.99/mo. https://platform.stepfun.ai/docs/en/step-plan/overview
Yes, I meant the Flash version.
I have used Kimi 2.5 and GLM 5.3 (& 5.3 Flash). Do not need them for what I do outside of spec hardening (basically, a lot of chatting).
I tend to know exactly what I want and most of the weaker models are enough to get me there. I have mainly been using MiMo, DeepSeek V4 Flash and MuseSpark Contributor over the last month or so.
Huh wonder why they skipped 4?
Sometimes 4 is skipped due to being considered unlucky.
In China and in places influenced by Chinese culture, due to homonymy between "4" and death.
Sounds like death in Chinese.