Technique · reasoning

Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought

Eliciting step-by-step reasoning without few-shot exemplars, simply by appending a phrase like "let's think step by step".

Origin: University of Tokyo, 2022-05Read origin paper →Also known as: Let's think step by step

Products deploying

Avg research → prod

First commercial deploy

Deployment timeline

Claude Opus 4.6
Deployed 2026-02-16 · Velocity 4y
“Claude Opus exhibits zero-shot reasoning when prompted with 'think step by step' instructions.”
high
GPT-4o
Deployed 2026-02-16 · Velocity 4y
“GPT-4o exhibits zero-shot reasoning when prompted with 'think step by step', a hallmark of zero-shot CoT.”
high
GPT-5
Deployed 2026-02-16 · Velocity 4y
“GPT-5 exhibits zero-shot reasoning when prompted with 'think step by step', a hallmark of Zero-Shot CoT.”
high
Claude 3
Deployed 2026-02-18 · Velocity 4y
“Claude 3 demonstrates zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning without explicit few-shot examples.”
high
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Deployed 2026-02-23 · Velocity 4y
“Claude exhibits zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning when prompted appropriately.”
high
Claude Haiku 4.5
Deployed 2026-02-25 · Velocity 4y
“Claude models can perform zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning when prompted appropriately.”
high
GPT-5.3
Deployed 2026-02-26 · Velocity 4y
“GPT-5.3 exhibits zero-shot reasoning, likely prompted with step-by-step directives.”
medium
Claude 4.5
Deployed 2026-02-26 · Velocity 4y
“Claude demonstrates zero-shot reasoning capabilities without explicit step-by-step prompting.”
high
Qwen 3.6
Deployed 2026-03-31 · Velocity 4y
“Qwen 3.6 exhibits strong zero-shot reasoning capabilities.”
medium
GPT-5.4-Cyber
Deployed 2026-04-16 · Velocity 4y
“GPT-4 exhibits zero-shot CoT reasoning when prompted with 'think step by step'.”
high
GPT-Rosalind
Deployed 2026-04-16 · Velocity 4y
“GPT-Rosalind can perform zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning on biology tasks.”
high

Prior art

Chain-of-Thought Prompting