AI Glossary
Zero-Shot Prompting
Technique where the model solves a task without examples – from the instruction alone.
Definition
Zero-shot prompting is a prompting technique where you give a language model a task without examples – the model should generate the correct output from the instruction alone. Thanks to their extensive pre-training, modern models can solve many tasks zero-shot. If quality is insufficient, you escalate to few-shot prompting (with examples) or fine-tuning.
Related Terms
Sources: a16z AI Glossary