Yes, it was invented by an anonymous user on 4chan in the early 2020s, then sanitized by a Google paper some years later as CoT (chain of thought) or thinking t

Yes, it was invented by an anonymous user on 4chan in the early 2020s, then sanitized by a Google paper some years later as CoT (chain of thought) or thinking tags, where the model iterates on its own before writing a final response. All models do it now.