Beyond Chain-of-Thought: Building Smarter AI with Chain-of-Debate

As LLMs become smarter, so should their reasoning. Chain-of-Thought gave us step-by-step logic — but what happens when we need AI to challenge itself, self-correct, and think critically? That’s where Chain-of-Debate (CoD) steps in.

🔁 We explored:
- How multi-agent debate improves truthfulness and reduces hallucinations
- Real-world use cases (law, medicine, climate)
- Why CoD might just be the next frontier in responsible AI reasoning

Transcript

1. Beyond Chain-of-Thought: Building Smarter AI with Chain-of-Debate Kampala Ronnie Atuhaire Computer Scientist
2. AGI -> ASI Prompt Engineering Principles Chain-of-Thought Chain-of-Debate C.O.T Vs C.O.D Kampala
3. “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”– Joseph Joubert Kampala
4. AGI Vs ASI The Why ?
5. Why This Talk? Chapter One Advancing AI Reasoning Through Multi-Agent Argumentation
6. AI models are powerful but still hallucinate Chain-of-Thought improves logic, but lacks self-correction Chain-of-Debate (CoD) introduces critical thinking via argumentation Goal: Show how CoD leads to more accurate, reliable, and ethical AI ….
7. 64% AI Wins 64% of Debates Against Humans A study in Nature Human Behaviour (EPFL, Princeton) with 900 participants found that when LLMs like GPT‑4 know basic personal info, they win or persuade 64.4% of debates against human opponents…
8. Prompting Evolution Overview Few-Shot Self-Refinement Zero-Shot C.O.T C.O.D
9. Chapter Two ++ Self Refinement Limitations of Chain-of-Thought
10. Still linear and one-sided No mechanism for challenging false assumptions Doesn't model real-world disagreement
11. Chapter Three Introducing Chain-of-Debate
13. Benefits of Chain-of-Debate Chapter Four The Why ?
14. Exposes reasoning flaws Encourages deeper understanding Improves accuracy and trust Useful in medicine, law, ethics, policy, etc. C.O.D
15. "Should AI make ….. {hiring,legal, …} decisions?"
16. Legal reasoning (pro/con analysis) Medical diagnostics (symptom analysis) Policy debates (climate, ethics) Education (critical thinking AI tutors) Stay in the know about upcoming events, catch up on content you missed, and connect with Google experts. Applications & Use Cases
17. More compute/resources Prompt complexity Risk of circular reasoning if unstructured Need for good debate format design Challenges & Considerations
18. CoT introduced structured, step-by-step logic, boosting performance on complex tasks. CoD builds on this by introducing multi-agent interactions where arguments and counterarguments surface more nuanced reasoning, leading to better outcomes. Below is a comparison of both approaches. CoD vs CoT
19. Chain-of-Thought is logic. Chain-of-Debate is wisdom. Atuhaire R
20. Questions? Let's debate!