AI Glossary

Chain of thought

Also called CoT

What does “Chain of thought” mean?

Chain of thought: Having a model work through intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer, either because the prompt asks it to or because the model was trained to reason that way. It tends to help with math, logic and multi-step problems, though the written steps don't always reflect exactly how the model reached its answer.

Chain of thought visual guide: Having a model work through intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer, either because the prompt asks it to or because the model was trained to reason that way. It tends to help with math, logic and multi-step problems, though the written steps don't always reflect exactly how the model reached its answer.
Visual guide Open full size (new tab)

What is an example of “Chain of thought”?

Asking a model to "work through this step by step" before it answers a word problem often makes arithmetic slips less likely.

Keep learning

See also

Reasoning modelTermPrompt engineeringTermHallucinationTerm

More from Franklin

On Franklin

Prompt libraryPage

Same topic

ReActTermChunkingTermBatch APITermContext windowTermAPITerm