Step3 Model: How a 321B-Parameter AI Beats 37B Models at 39% Lower Cost

Step3: How a 321-Billion-Parameter Model Runs Cheaper Than a 37-Billion One A Plain-English Guide for Developers, Students, and Curious Minds Quick Takeaways What you get Number Cost per 1 M tokens (32 K context) 0.13 USD (vs. 0.21 for DeepSeek-V3) Tokens per second on one H800 GPU 4 039 (vs. 2 324 for DeepSeek-V3) GPUs to start serving 32 (vs. 128–320 for similar models) If you only remember three things, remember those. 1. What Exactly Is Step3? Step3 is a vision-language model with 321 billion total parameters, but only 38 billion are active for each token. Think of it like …