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CoT vs. Direct on GSM8K

Ask the model to show its work, and it gets the answer right far more often.

Key Insight​

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting asks the model to write out its reasoning step by step before giving a final answer, instead of replying right away. This project measures the accuracy gain from that single change on GSM8K grade-school math problems.

Why This Matters​

The intermediate reasoning tokens give the model more room to compute and a place to lay out partial results. The same model — with no retraining at all — solves much harder problems just by being told to think out loud first.