---
title: "Chain of thought"
description: "Ask a model to show its work and accuracy on multi-step problems jumps — chain-of-thought prompting turns latent computation into explicit intermediate tok"
canonical_url: "https://fanout.sh/ai-engineering/lessons/chain-of-thought"
md_url: "https://fanout.sh/ai-engineering/lessons/chain-of-thought.md"
access: "public"
---

# Chain of thought

Ask a model to show its work and accuracy on multi-step problems jumps — chain-of-thought prompting turns latent computation into explicit intermediate tok

## Public overview

Ask a model to show its work and accuracy on multi-step problems jumps — chain-of-thought prompting turns latent computation into explicit intermediate tokens the model can condition on. The insight that grew from a prompting trick into the training target behind dedicated reasoning models.

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