On January 20, 2025, Shanghai Leap Star Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. announced the launch of two new members of its Step series language models—Step-2mini and Step-2 Literary Master Edition. This initiative aims to meet the differentiated needs of developers for language models in various creative scenarios, further expanding its application capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence.
Following the release of the trillion-parameter language model Step-2 last year, Leap Star has consistently ranked first among domestic large models on international authoritative lists such as LiveBench, thanks to its industry-leading model performance. The release of Step-2 provides developers with powerful tools that support various AI applications, including plot creation, role-playing, and copywriting. However, as application scenarios continue to expand, developers have raised higher demands for the response speed, cost-effectiveness, and creative capabilities of language models. In response, Leap Star has introduced two new members of the Step-2 Family to meet diverse market needs.
Step-2mini is a lightweight agile model that retains over 80% of Step-2's model performance with only about 3% of the parameters. It significantly enhances generation speed and cost-effectiveness while maintaining efficient performance. With an input of 4000 tokens, Step-2mini has an average first-word latency of only 0.17 seconds, demonstrating extremely fast response capabilities. Furthermore, this model employs a newly developed attention mechanism architecture—MFA (Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention) and its variant MFA-Key-Reuse, which saves nearly 94% of KV cache costs compared to traditional multi-head attention architectures, greatly reducing inference costs. Developers can now access the Step-2mini API through the Leap Star open platform, with input costs of 1 yuan per million tokens and output costs of 2 yuan per million tokens.
Meanwhile, Step-2 Literary Master Edition focuses on content creation, aiming to provide stronger support for creators. This version inherits Step-2's knowledge base and ability to handle textual details, further enhancing its content creation capabilities. Unlike the "hollow" content generated by some large models, Step-2 Literary Master Edition can fully understand the creative needs of users, generating works that are logically coherent, linguistically concise, and rich in thought and unique style. Whether it's a mystery novel, a feel-good story, or a science fiction tale, Step-2 Literary Master Edition can showcase exceptional creative power. For example, its generated science fiction novels not only draw on cutting-edge scientific knowledge but also incorporate humanistic philosophy, presenting profound themes and captivating narrative styles.
Currently, Step-2 Literary Master Edition has been launched on the Yuewen App, with the web version set to go live this week (https://yuewen.cn) for user experience. Leap Star has stated that it will continue to intensively release more new models before the Spring Festival, providing users with a more comprehensive and powerful general large model.