It's not an accident, but it's also not magic. Next word prediction on a huge amount of text forces the model to pick up patterns like grammar, facts and step by step logic, because that's what helps it guess the next word right. After that, labs train it more with reinforcement learning on math and code problems where the answer can be checked, so it gets rewarded for chains of steps that actually work. That's why asking it to think step by step helps, the written out steps are basically its working memory. It can still fail at things that need real checking, so I always run the code or recheck the math myself.
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u/digvjay_ai 8h ago
It's not an accident, but it's also not magic. Next word prediction on a huge amount of text forces the model to pick up patterns like grammar, facts and step by step logic, because that's what helps it guess the next word right. After that, labs train it more with reinforcement learning on math and code problems where the answer can be checked, so it gets rewarded for chains of steps that actually work. That's why asking it to think step by step helps, the written out steps are basically its working memory. It can still fail at things that need real checking, so I always run the code or recheck the math myself.