What Is Chain of Thought?

Chain of Thought — a technique in which a model is prompted to generate intermediate reasoning steps before producing a final answer.

Chain-of-thought prompting can improve performance on multi-step problems and makes a model's apparent reasoning visible. A governance caveat: the stated chain of thought is not a guaranteed faithful account of how the model actually reached its answer, so it should not be treated as a reliable explanation for high-stakes decisions.

Source: Machine-learning research