Very interesting new work from Microsoft Research. (bookmark it) They show that a 4B model can be tuned to out-negotiate the GPT-5 family of…

Very interesting new work from Microsoft Research. (bookmark it) They show that a 4B model can be tuned to out-negotiate the GPT-5 family of models. The dispositions that make an assistant pleasant make it a poor delegate. They show that a friendly frontier model volunteers its principal's private information and concedes at the first sign of resistance. SocialRL trains social reasoning directly in a 4B model across six principal-driven domains including negotiation, job interviews and marketplace haggling. After training, 78% of buyer openings anchor below target against 3% untrained. Cascade RL and multi-teacher distillation consolidate the specialists into one 4B at 0.627 average utility, above GPT-5.1 at 0.619 and GPT-5.2 at 0.613. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13787 Track more trending AI papers in our academy: https://academy.dair.ai/

Source: DAIR.AI (X) | 2026-08-17