The Frontier
AI 101 — What is chain of thought?
Chain of thought is the step-by-step reasoning a language model generates before it gives a final answer — the "show your work" part of AI problem-solving. Instead of jumping straight from question to answer, the model writes out its intermediate steps, and that simple change measurably improves how well it handles math, logic, and anything with multiple stages. The idea surfaced in a January 2022 paper from Google Research: the authors found that asking a model to work through a problem aloud
