Comment by inciampati

You're correct, the distinction matters. Autoregressive models have no hidden state between tokens, just the visible sequence. Every forward pass starts fresh from the tokens alone.But that's precisely why they need chain-of-thought: they're using the output sequence itself as their working memory. It's computationally universal but absurdly inefficient, like having amnesia between every word and needing to re-read everything you've written.https://thinks.lol/2025/01/memory-makes-computation-universa...