Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier

In their first demo video, to make a 3D render of the photo, the thinking trace gives away the game:

> Interesting! It turns out there's already an existing project here [...] The project is fully built [...]

I'm always astounded how little effort is put into checking the AI answers displayed in these announcements. Back when I paid more attention, I remember OpenAI's and Google's demos constantly showed their AIs giving wrong answers.

  > 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.

IT's Artificial Analysis Index is the same as Kimi K3, which is about 4.6x bigger, and GLM 5.3, which is about 1.25x bigger. Pricing is $1/$2.70 i/o. Openweights on October 15.

GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 are just below where I can use them to completely replace frontier models. Oddly,* SWE-2 is there for me.

If this performs similarly in the real world, we're approaching a level of capability where for most devs, it only makes sense to pay for Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions if they are heavily subsidized and actually cheaper than these alternative options.

* Oddly, because I perceived Devin as being kind of a joke before trying SWE-2.

"Pareto frontier" really is the new "web-scale".

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.

For anyone else looking for the pricing: https://platform.stepfun.ai/docs/en/guides/pricing/details#p...

Huh wonder why they skipped 4?

How about adding a contested historical facts benchmark?