A 600B AI Model at $1 Per Million Tokens Just Launched. Here's What the Benchmarks Don't Tell You.
StepFun launched Step 5 Preview on September 20 at $1/$2.70 per million tokens — independently verified by Artificial Analysis at Intelligence Index 44. The 95% cache discount is the most enterprise-relevant number. But every coding benchmark is self-reported, the HF repo is gone, and MiMo-V2.6-Pro is cheaper and higher-scored. Here's the honest breakdown.