So who exactly is StepFun? What is their business (how do they make money)? Each...

kristopolous · 2026-02-19T08:59:29 1771491569

They've been around a couple years. This is the first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.

Keep a tab on aihubmix, the Chinese openrouter, if you want to stay on top of the latest models. They keep track of things like the Baichuan, Doubao, baai (beijing academy), Meituan, 01.AI (yi), xiaomi, etc...

Much larger chinese coverage than openrouter

tarruda · 2026-02-19T12:48:54 1771505334

> This is the first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.

Before Step 3.5 Flash, I've been hearing a lot about ACEStep as being the only open weights competitor to Suno.

Havoc · 2026-02-19T09:26:42 1771493202

>first model that has really broken into the anglosphere.

Do you know of a couple of interesting ones that haven't yet?

kristopolous · 2026-02-19T09:31:56 1771493516

doubao (bytedance) seed models are interesting

Keep your eye on Baidu's Ernie https://ernie.baidu.com/

Artificial analysis is generally on top of everything

https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models

Those two are really the new players

Nanbeige which they haven't benchmarked just put out a shockingly good 3b model https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige - specifically https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/Nanbeige4.1-3B

You have to tweak the hyper parameter like they say but I'm getting quality output, commensurate with maybe a 32b model, in exchange for a huge thinking lag

It's the new LFM 2.5

admiralrohan · 2026-02-19T12:38:25 1771504705

Never heard of Nanbeige, thanks for sharing. "Good" is subjective though, in which tasks can I use it and where to avoid?

kristopolous · 2026-02-19T12:40:46 1771504846

it's a 3b model. Fire it up. If you have ollama just do this:

    ollama create nanbeige-custom -f <(curl https://day50.dev/Nanbeige4.1-params.Modelfile)

That has the hyperparameters already in there. Then you can try it out

It's taking up like 2.5GB of ram.

my test query is always "compare rust and go with code samples". I'm telling you, the thinking token count is ... high...

Here's what I got https://day50.dev/rust_v_go.md

I just tried it on a 4gb raspberry pi and a 2012 era x230 with an i5-3210. Worked.

It'll take about 45 minutes on the pi which you know, isn't OOM...so there's that....

Havoc · 2026-02-19T13:05:08 1771506308

Thanks!

0x1997 · 2026-02-19T05:12:48 1771477968

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StepFun

SilverElfin · 2026-02-19T05:42:19 1771479739

Thanks. Do they sell any of these products today or is it more like research? I am not able to find anything relating to pricing on their website. Just a chatbot.

0x1997 · 2026-02-19T06:35:23 1771482923

Princing can be found on their docs website https://platform.stepfun.ai/docs/en/pricing/details

tarruda · 2026-02-19T12:47:30 1771505250

They seem to be the same company that released ACEStep music generation model: https://acestep.io/

Though the only mention I found was in ComfyUI docs: https://docs.comfy.org/tutorials/audio/ace-step/ace-step-v1

deaux · 2026-02-19T05:01:39 1771477299

Might want to give it a search.