Beginner · Generative AI

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Asking models to show step-by-step reasoning before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.

Technical Definition

Asking models to show step-by-step reasoning before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.

How it works

CoT prompting elicits intermediate reasoning steps. This dramatically improves math, logic, and multi-step tasks. Variants include zero-shot CoT ('think step by step'), few-shot CoT (worked examples), and self-consistency (majority vote across chains).

Related Concepts

• Large Language Model (LLM) — A massive neural network trained on vast text corpora to understand and generate human language with remarkable fluency.
• Fine-Tuning — Adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task by continuing training on a smaller, task-specific dataset.
• Prompt Engineering — The art of crafting effective input instructions to guide LLM behavior without changing model weights.