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Cake day: July 18th, 2025

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  • a CoT means externally iterating an LLM

    Not necessarily. Yes, a chain of thought can be provided externally, for example through user prompting or another source, which can even be another LLM. One of the key observations behind these models commonly referred to as reasoning is that since an external LLM can be used to provide “thoughts”, could an LLM provide those steps itself, without depending on external sources?

    To do this, it generates “thoughts” around the user’s prompt, essentially exploring the space around it and trying different options. These generated steps are added to the context window and are usually much larger that the prompt itself, which is why these models are sometimes referred to as long chain-of-thought models. Some frontends will show a summary of the long CoT, although this is normally not the raw context itself, but rather a version that is summarised and re-formatted.