[FeepingCreature]

Absolutely. QuietSTaR is going to make CoT obsolete. It's just, it won't make it obsolete by showing that CoT does nothing, but by getting the LLM to embed invisible CoT-like token sequences into the context on its own. That's a victory for CoT, not a loss.

"Let's think step by step" is a hack. It was always a hack. Its main payoff was showing people where the model had a weakness and how to (hackily, heavily dependent on training data and phrasing) route around it. Now with QS, the models will be able to bypass that weakness on their own.

> I hesitate to the use description as "think," just biasing correlations for subsequent generations.

This is of course a fully general description of any iterative computation. :)

[activatedgeek]

Makes sense. Thank you for a the QS reference!