AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is zero-shot chain-of-thought?
Zero-shot chain-of-thought: Triggering step-by-step reasoning with a plain phrase such as 'Let's think step by step', without supplying any worked examples. It was shown in research to improve accuracy on reasoning benchmarks for large models with almost no prompt effort.
Zero-shot chain-of-thought: an example
Adding 'Let's think step by step.' to a word problem makes the model list its calculation before the final number.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Zero-shot prompting
- Analogical prompting
- Assistant prefill
- Automatic prompt engineer
- Batch API
- Chain-of-thought faithfulness
- Chain-of-thought prompting
- Chain-of-Verification
Where you learn it
Zero-shot chain-of-thought is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.