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

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