Prompting Science Report 2: The Decreasing Value of Chain of Thought in Prompting

Abstract

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a technique that encourages a large language model (LLM) to "think step by step" (Wei et al., 2022). CoT is a widely adopted method for improving reasoning tasks, however, our findings reveal a more nuanced picture of its effectiveness. We demonstrate two things:

• The effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought prompting can vary greatly depending on the type of task and model. For non-reasoning models, CoT generally improves average performance by a small amount, particularly if the model does not inherently engage in step-by-step processing by default. However, CoT can introduce more variability in answers, sometimes triggering occasional errors in questions the model would otherwise get right. We also found that many recent models perform some form of CoT reasoning even if not asked; for these models, a request to perform CoT had little impact. Performing CoT generally requires far more tokens (increasing cost and time) than direct answers.

• For models designed with explicit reasoning capabilities, CoT prompting often results in only marginal, if any, gains in answer accuracy. However, it significantly increases the time and tokens needed to generate a response.

Taken together, this suggests that a simple CoT prompt is generally still a useful tool for boosting average performance in non-reasoning models, especially older or smaller models that may not engage in a CoT reasoning by default. However, the gains must be weighed against increased response times and potential decreases in perfect accuracy due to more variability in answers. For dedicated reasoning models, the added benefits of explicit CoT prompting appear negligible and may not justify the substantial increase in processing time.

Keywords: llm, large language models, benchmarking, chain-of-thought, cot, prompt engineering