Chain of thought means an AI solves a task in intermediate steps instead of answering straight away. This often makes complex answers more accurate.
Illustration: AI-generated · AI Compare Ninja · CC BY 4.0
Example
For a word problem, the AI first works out partial results and then gives the answer.
For pros
This used to be triggered with prompts like “think step by step”. Reasoning models now do it themselves and partly hide the steps. The thoughts shown are not always a faithful picture of how the model computes internally.
