Comment by minimaxir
12 hours ago
"Chain of Thoughts" is a term from the title of a 2022 research paper "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903), well before ChatGPT and the subsequent marketing hype. If anything, it's the most correct way to use the term.
The term is an anthropomorphised pseudoexplanation for what it actually refers to. It's akin to calling genetic mutation "the forces of evolution", or price negotiation "the invisible hand of the market".
We do that sort of thing when we don't know what the thing we're trying to describe is and have nothing better - a contemporary example of an appropriate use of this would be "dark matter". But we do know what this is. It's "instruction steps". Not a series of thoughts!
Can we please aim higher than Victorian-era allegory and metaphors. If we don't, we'll keep getting people saying stuff like "GPT-6 is better at hiding its thoughts".
I truly appreciate your depth of insight on the matter.
Like I said elsewhere marketing stepped in shit and it's gonna stick.