Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

By putting a few exemplars that spell out step-by-step worked solutions into the prompt, the model imitates that format and reasons through arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic problems one step at a time. The benefit appears mainly at large model scale and substantially raised accuracy on benchmarks like GSM8K math word problems. It made intermediate-computation prompting a standard, training-free way to get harder reasoning out of existing models.