Chain of thought
A series of reasoning steps, written in plain language, that a model produces before its final answer. Showing such steps in prompt examples, or training a model to produce them, helps on multi-step problems.
Introduced by
Chain of thought, 2022
Used by
- Self-consistency, 2022
- PaLM, 2022
- Zero-shot CoT, 2022
- ReAct, 2022
- Flan-T5 / Flan-PaLM, 2022
- o1, 2024
- DeepSeek-R1, 2025
- GPT-5, 2025