What is Chain-of-Thought prompting and how does it aid reasoning?

For AI / LLM Engineer Data Scientist ML Engineer

The short answer

Chain-of-Thought prompting asks the model to generate intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, either via examples or instructions like think step by step. Producing intermediate steps lets the model decompose multi-step problems and conditions the final answer on its own reasoning, improving accuracy on arithmetic, logic, and multi-hop tasks.

How to think about it

Chain-of-Thought prompting asks the model to generate intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, either via examples or instructions like think step by step. Producing intermediate steps lets the model decompose multi-step problems and conditions the final answer on its own reasoning, improving accuracy on arithmetic, logic, and multi-hop tasks.

Learn it properly Reasoning models & test-time compute

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