StepFun's new model matches one nearly five times its size.
Chinese lab StepFun put Step 5 Preview online on 18 September with no launch announcement. Step 5 is a quarter the size of Moonshot's Kimi K3, yet ties it on one intelligence index. Running it costs about a fifth of what Kimi K3 charges for the same output.
Why it mattersSize has stopped being the price of frontier quality, and the bill for using one dropped with it. Cheaper strong models are what make AI features inside your everyday apps affordable.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
Mistral gave away its trillion-parameter model, with one catch.2026-10-29Nvidia released an open model that writes down speech in 40 languages.
2026-10-29Google's Gemini 4 Carbon edged past Claude on a hard AI ranking.
2026-10-29Google's newest world model builds worlds you can hear and talk to.
2026-10-28OpenAI's new mid-size model costs half as much as the one before.
2026-10-27