Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (IT Home · Oct 12, 2026)

Step 5 Preview Launches on Tencent WorkBuddy with Two-Week Free Access

KEY FACTS

StepFun announced on October 12 that the Step 5 Preview model is now available on Tencent WorkBuddy.
From October 12 to October 25, the model is exclusively free on WorkBuddy.
StepFun launched Step 5 Preview on September 20, targeting scenarios such as coding and finance.
The model uses a sparse MoE architecture with 600B total parameters and 27B activated parameters.
The model supports a 1 million token context, natively supports text and visual inputs, and will open-source its weights on October 15.

KEY DATA

600BTotal Parameters

27BActivated Parameters

1 million tokensContext Window

October 12 to October 25Free Access Period

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

StepFun is using Tencent WorkBuddy's office scenarios to offer free access, validating Agentic capabilities with real user traffic rather than just publishing benchmark scores. With 600B sparse MoE plus a million-token context, cost pressure is significant, and the two-week free period looks more like a customer acquisition experiment. If retention data looks good, the competition for domestic large models at the office entry point will clearly accelerate.

Source: IT Home report