Glossary

Chain of thought — Glossary

Prompting or training patterns that encourage step-by-step intermediate problem solving.

Also known as: CoT

Reviewed:

Full definition

Chain-of-thought techniques can improve some multi-step benchmarks by eliciting intermediate work. They do not guarantee correctness, and fluent steps can still be wrong.

Use high-level, verifiable plans and tools for exact math. Do not attempt to extract private hidden reasoning channels beyond what a product intentionally exposes.

Related encyclopedia topic

Chain-of-Thought Prompting — Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting encourages models to work through intermediate steps on multi-step problems, improving some reasoning benchmarks when used…

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