AI Terminology Course
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Chain of Thought

Definition

A prompt engineering technique that forces the LLM to explicitly write out its step-by-step reasoning process before outputting the final answer, dramatically increasing its accuracy on complex logic and math problems.

Explain Like I'm New

Asking the AI to 'Show its work' like in a math class. If you just ask for the answer, the AI might guess and get it wrong. If you say 'Think step-by-step', the AI talks to itself, processes the logic slowly, and gets it right.

Real World Example

Prompt: 'If John has 5 apples, eats 2, buys 10, and splits them with Mary, how many does he have? THINK STEP BY STEP.' The AI writes out every math operation on a new line before giving the final answer.

Common Use Cases

  • •Math problems
  • •Logic puzzles
  • •Complex decision making

Interview Questions

basic

  • What is the magic phrase used to trigger Chain of Thought reasoning in a basic prompt?

intermediate

  • Mechanically, why does Chain of Thought make the AI smarter?

Flash Cards

Question

Magic phrase?

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Answer

'Let's think step by step.'

Question

Why does it work?

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Answer

Because LLMs generate text sequentially. By forcing it to write out the intermediate steps, you are actually giving the AI more 'Compute Time' and generating a larger Context Window of logical tokens for the Attention Mechanism to rely on before generating the final answer.