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AMA Announcement: StepFun AI, The Opensource Lab Behind Step-3.5-Flash Model (Thursday, 8AM-11AM PST)

Posted by XMasterrrr@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 14 comments

AMA Announcement: StepFun AI, The Opensource Lab Behind Step-3.5-Flash Model (Thursday, 8AM-11AM PST)
Hi r/LocalLLaMA 👋 We're excited for Thursday's guests: **The StepFun Team!** **Kicking things off Thursday, Feb. 19th, 8 AM–11 AM PST** ⚠️ **Note:** The AMA itself will be hosted in a **separate thread,** please don’t post questions here.

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14 Comments

muyuu@reddit

so it wasn't last Thursday i guess?
View on Reddit #78886798

Bartfeels24@reddit

For anyone not in the loop, Step-3.5-Flash is actually a big deal for open source. It's one of the first to claim GPT-4o-level reasoning at a 7B size. Keen to ask them about the distillation process from their much larger proprietary model.
View on Reddit #78883512

Bartfeels24@reddit

Anyone familiar with Step models should definitely tune in. Their quantization work has been solid for running on consumer GPUs. Good opportunity to ask about their approach vs competitors.
View on Reddit #78807835

Bartfeels24@reddit

Thanks for organizing this! For anyone unfamiliar, Step-3.5-Flash is seriously competitive with Qwen and Claude on speed/quality tradeoffs. Definitely worth tuning in to ask about their quantization approach and inference optimization strategies.
View on Reddit #78767790

tarruda@reddit

First of all, Step 3.5 Flash is amazing and seriously the first local LLM that worked well for agentic coding for me. Thank you for it! As discussed in the llama.cpp PR(https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/19283#issuecomment-3870270263), it seems Step 3.5 Flash currently has a bug that makes it enter an infinite loop in some situations. Are you planning to release a new version of the model with that fixed or is it something that can be tweaked with inference parameters? Also, any plans for Step 3.5 Flash VL?
View on Reddit #78724033

llama-impersonator@reddit

thanks for the model drop, it's about the smallest model i've used that has that luxurious "big model smell." one thing that would be nice in future versions would be the ability to set a thinking budget similar to seed-oss or gpt-oss.
View on Reddit #78688239

WeeklyAcadia3941@reddit

I just wanted to say that step-3.5-flash works really well for many uses and is very fast. You should give it a try.
View on Reddit #78646547

muyuu@reddit

Do you guys plan to improve your sub 128GB VRAM models? Save for cycling issues, it's the smartest model i can run in my Strix Halo. Hoping for more in the future!
View on Reddit #78630792

__JockY__@reddit

Didn’t they just do one? Or did I miss something?
View on Reddit #78565679

ClimateBoss@reddit

nah StepFun had to redo cause of MiniMax
View on Reddit #78585617

__JockY__@reddit

lol MiniMax stomped their model, stomped their release (tool calling templates actually work with MiniMax) and now they got stomped in the AMA. Huh, I guess I’m still salty about Step’s botched parsers, templates, and utter lack of coordination with vLLM, sglang, llama.cpp, etc. ahead of dropping weights for 3.5 without any tool calling support. What a fiasco. Compare with MiniMax: day 0 support on all major inference engines. Parsers and templates perfect. Tool calling so good it works perfectly with Claude cli. Boom. Instant adoption and it’s my team’s daily driver. We tried to get Step to even work for tools and gave up as it was just burning hours we could have used to be productive. I strongly suspect that StepfunAI deliberately hobbled tool-calling in the public model’s release-time integrations while making the API work well in order to attract subscribers while maintaining an open-source friendly image. I guess my question will be “will you do better next time?”
View on Reddit #78607642

ortegaalfredo@reddit

The only thing that MiniMax has going on is day 0 support. But Step is way superior in most of my benchmarks. Too bad is impossible to run it in anything other than llama.cpp.
View on Reddit #78614868

Significant_Fig_7581@reddit

Any plans for a lighter version? I'm a big fan of the big 3.5 Flash though I can't run it locally I've seen it doing great in comparison with models twice its size, A smaller version would be great!
View on Reddit #78574588

XMasterrrr@reddit (OP)

Hi r/LocalLLaMA 👋 We're excited for Thursday's guests: **The StepFun Team!** **Kicking things off Thursday, Feb. 19th, 8 AM–11 AM PST** ⚠️ **Note:** The AMA itself will be hosted in a **separate thread,** please don’t post questions here.
View on Reddit #78538496