Giving artificial intelligence (AI) systems an "inner monologue" makes them considerably better at reasoning, new research shows.

The method trains AI systems to think before they respond to prompts, just as many people consider what we should say next before we speak. This is different from the way scientists have trained mainstay AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, which don't "think" about what they write or anticipate different possibilities for the next steps in a conversation.

Dubbed "Quiet-STaR," the new method instructs an AI system to generate many inner rationales in parallel before responding to a conversational prompt. When the AI answers prompts, it generates a mixture of these predictions with and without a rationale, printing the best answer — which can be verified by a human participant depending on the nature of the question.

Finally, it learns by discarding rationales that proved incorrect. In effect, the training method gives AI agents the capacity to anticipate future conversations and learn from ongoing ones.

It's always advisable to think before you speak.

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