StepFun's Step 5 Preview matches Kimi K3 at one-third the price, per Artificial Analysis
No-Head-Royal · reddit · 2026-09-19
According to Artificial Analysis, Chinese lab StepFun released Step 5 Preview, scoring 44 on intelligence — equal to Kimi K3 (max) — at one-third the price, putting it firmly on the cost/intelligence Pareto frontier.
The poster notes this shows another previously non-frontier Chinese lab has reached the frontier and that Chinese progress hasn't stalled, though the closed-source model's competitiveness against other Chinese labs remains to be seen. As a side note, Google slipped from #7 to #8 among labs on the same ranking.
More from Models
- kalomaze traces GPT-5.6 vs GLM benchmark gap to latent chat-template serving bug — kalomaze · 2026-09-19
- Dev claims Codex users are 'getting scammed' over usage terms — AIFlow_ML · 2026-09-19
- Step 5 Preview Quietly Debuts on AA: Score 44, 1M Context, $1/1M Input — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-19
- Developers say Codex is 'not sustainable' under current usage limits — AIFlow_ML · 2026-09-19
- Cognition ships SWE-2 coding model: 1 point behind Fable 5.1 at 64% less cost — AxSaucedo · 2026-09-19
- Jev Hits 36M Views in 2 Days, Community Ships 6 Open Clones — Latent Space · 2026-09-19