AI Glossary
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Getting AI to think step-by-step
Definition
Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a prompting technique where the model is encouraged to reason through a problem step-by-step before giving a final answer. Adding "let's think step by step" to a prompt often dramatically improves accuracy on complex reasoning tasks. Extended thinking features in Claude and OpenAI o-series models are implementations of this idea at scale.