AI Definitions: Chain of thought (CoT)

Chain of thought (CoT) prompts – Prompting an AI with “Using chain of thought…” or “Let’s think about the answer step by step…” is telling it to answer a question by breaking complex tasks into a sequence of logical steps. These types of prompts simulate human-like reasoning by having the AI evaluate its response. This slows arriving at the final prompt response, but it cuts down on hallucinations and help with difficult problems. Users can read the fascinating and often convoluted way it got to its response, which is a help to AI  safety researchers looking for undesirable behaviors like deception. However, the reported Chain-of-Thought might not accurately reflect the actual reasoning process. In fact, a model could even hide aspects of its thought process from the user.

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