chain of thought

Chain of thought is an AI technique where the model writes out its reasoning step by step before giving an answer. Often abbreviated CoT. Tech jargon. Not concerning. If your kid talks about it they are interested in how AI thinks. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in.

Chain of thought (often abbreviated CoT) is an AI prompting and training technique where a model writes intermediate reasoning steps before producing an answer. Use in AI research and engineering contexts. Formal equivalent: "intermediate reasoning trace." Common non-native mistake: using it generally to mean any reasoning; in AI it specifically refers to the explicit, written-out step-by-step output style. Read or listen to the word in context several times before trying it yourself; the right register is harder to learn than the dictionary meaning.