Chatbots & language AI Dictionary

Zero-shot

When an AI does a task it wasn't shown any examples of in your prompt.

“Few-shot” means you include a few examples to guide it. Zero-shot relies entirely on what the model already knows.

Example

Asking a chatbot to write a YouTube title without giving it sample titles is zero-shot.

Why it matters to you

If results are off, adding two or three examples (few-shot) often helps a lot.

Related terms

Prompt EngineeringThe skill of writing prompts that reliably get the result you want. LLM (Large Language Model)An AI model trained on huge amounts of text so it can understand and write language.