DeepSeek-R1 vs Step-5-Preview

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 24 October 2026.

deepseek-ai · A · Open weights
Params
684.5 B
Context
163,840
30d
1.4 M
mit · commercial OK
stepfun-ai · B · Open weights
Params
604.3 B
Context
—
30d
2 K

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification DeepSeek-R1 Step-5-Preview
Deployment Open weights · also via API Open weights · also via API
Parameters 684.5 B 604.3 B
Architecture DeepseekV3ForCausalLM Step5ForConditionalGeneration
Context length 163,840 1,000,000
Licence mit other
Commercial use Allowed Unknown
Languages — —
Downloads 30d 1,391,551 2,467
Downloads all time 50.3 M 2 K
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated No No
First seen on the Hub 2025-01-20 2026-09-20
API input price / 1M tokens $0.70 $1.00
API output price / 1M tokens $2.50 $2.70
Est. cost per 1M input + 1M output tokens $3.20 $3.70
Cached input / 1M tokens — $0.10
AA Intelligence Index 11.4 43.7
AA Coding Index 24.6 —
AA Agentic Index 1.1 —
Max output tokens 16,000 64,000
API providers — 4
Tool calling Yes Yes
Reasoning mode Yes Yes

API cost

Estimated cost of 1M input + 1M output tokens via OpenRouter

DeepSeek-R1 $3.20
Step-5-Preview $3.70

DeepSeek-R1 is 1.2× cheaper at list price.

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 89 days (28 Jul – 24 Oct)

9.9 M1 K
DeepSeek-R1 Step-5-Preview

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

Step-5-Preview · fp16 806.5 GB / 24 GB
❌ Won’t fit
DeepSeek-R1 · fp16 @ 160K ctx 2,811.5 GB / 24 GB
❌ Won’t fit

Adjacent comparisons