Technique
Zero-shot Prompting
Asking the model to do a task purely from a natural-language description, no examples.
Definition
Zero-shot prompting describes the task in words and lets the model infer the rest from pre-training. Modern frontier LLMs are strong zero-shot baselines for most everyday tasks, making it the first thing to try before adding examples or tuning.
Common use cases
- Rapid prototyping
- Open-set tasks
- Cost-sensitive apps