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.
Related event: StepFun Launches Step 5 Preview: 600B MoE Flagship, Open-Weights on Oct 15(17 posts)→
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