AI & DataIntermediate
Chain-of-Thought
PronunciationCHAYN-uv-THOT
Definition
Chain-of-Thought is a prompting technique that encourages a large language model to break down complex problems into intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final answer. This approach significantly improves the model's performance on tasks requiring logic, mathematics, or multi-step analysis.
Where you hear it
In AI research papers, prompt engineering workshops, and when optimizing LLM workflows for complex reasoning tasks.
Examples
Adding "Let's think step-by-step" to your prompt is a simple way to trigger Chain-of-Thought reasoning.
We implemented Chain-of-Thought to improve the model's accuracy on our internal logic-heavy datasets.
Common mistake
Thinking that Chain-of-Thought is a built-in feature of the model architecture rather than a specific prompting strategy used to guide the model's generation process.