Can language models reason?
Illustration by Rajashree Rajadhyax Large language models are an impressive technology that excels at providing answers based on vast knowledge of the world. However, they often struggle with reasoning and logic-based questions. To overcome this limitation, the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method was introduced. This technique emulates how humans solve problems by reasoning step-by-step. Just as we break down complex problems into smaller, manageable parts for analysis and logical resolution, CoT guides language models to adopt a similar approach. By mimicking this natural, structured problem-solving process, CoT enhances the models’ ability to handle logic-driven tasks with greater accuracy and reliability. This approach, however, requires more time and computational effort because it involves processing more tokens . Tokens are the building blocks of text, like words or parts of words, that the model uses to understand and generate responses. Since the Chain-of-Thought method involv...