Chain-of-thought reasoning

Several teams have explored the power of chain-of-thought reasoning by using techniques from an arcane branch of theoretical computer science called computational complexity theory. 

It’s the latest chapter in a line of research that uses complexity theory to study the intrinsic capabilities and limitations of language models. 

These efforts clarify where we should expect models to fail, and they might point toward new approaches to building them.

“They remove some of the magic,” said Dimitris Papailiopoulos, a machine learning researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “That’s a good thing.”