o3 mini vs Step-3.5-Flash

o3 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o3 mini, released by OpenAI in January 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o3 family designed for efficient, cost-effective STEM problem-solving. It features a 200K token context window and adjustable chain-of-thought effort settings, allowing developers to trade reasoning depth for speed. o3 mini targets science, mathematics, and coding applications where lower inference cost and faster response times are a priority.

StepFun

Step-3.5-Flash, released by StepFun on February 2, 2026, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 197 billion total parameters and approximately 11 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window using a 3:1 sliding-window-to-full-attention ratio, processing 100–350 tokens per second. Step-3.5-Flash targets agentic tasks, coding workflows, and open-source deployments requiring frontier reasoning capabilities with efficient inference, under an Apache 2.0 license.