AI Glossary

Chain of thought

Also called CoT

The step-by-step reasoning a model writes out before its final answer. A 2022 Google paper showed that prompting large models for step-by-step reasoning improves their results on arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning.

See also

  • Reasoning model

    A model trained to work through a problem in steps before it answers, spending more test-time compute on problems such as math, coding and analysis.

  • Test-time compute

    Computation a model spends while answering rather than during training, for example reasoning at length, sampling several answers or searching among them.

  • Prompt engineering

    Writing and refining prompts to get better and more reliable results from a model, for example by giving clear instructions, examples or a required format.

Source: Wei et al., Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (2022) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

CC BY 4.0, attribution required.

This term

Orbyt Labs, Chain of thought (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/chain-of-thought

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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