When we think, our thoughts are composed of both nonverbal cognitive processes (we have access to their outputs, but generally lack introspective awareness of their inner workings), and verbalised thoughts (whether the “voice in your head” or actually spoken as “thinking out loud”).

Of course, there are no doubt significant differences between whatever LLMs are doing and whatever humans are doing when they “think” - but maybe they aren’t quite as dissimilar as many argue? In both cases, there is a mutual/circular relationship between a verbalised process and a nonverbal one (in the LLM case, the inner representations of the model)

Chain-of-thought is a technical term in LLMs — not literally “what it’s thinking.”

As far as I understand it, it’s a generated narration conditioned by the prompt, not direct access to internal reasoning.

It is text that describes a plausible/likely thought process that conditions future generation by it's presence in the context.

Wrong to the point of being misleading. This is a goal, not an assumption

Source: all of mechinterp

It is what it is thinking consciously / its internal narrative. For example a supervillain's internal narrative with their plans would go into their COT notepad. If we want to really lean into the analogy between human psychology and LLMs. The "internal reasoning" that people keep referencing in this thread.. referring to the transformer weights and inscrutable inner working of a GPT.. isn't reasoning, but more like instinct, or the subconscious.