AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is zero-shot prompting?
Zero-shot prompting: Asking a model to do a task using only an instruction, with no worked examples in the prompt. It relies on what the model already learned in training. It is the simplest starting point and often good enough for common tasks.
Zero-shot prompting: an example
Prompt: 'Classify this review as positive or negative: The delivery to Pune was two days late.' No sample reviews are shown.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Analogical prompting
- Assistant prefill
- Automatic prompt engineer
- Batch API
- Chain-of-thought faithfulness
- Chain-of-thought prompting
- Chain-of-Verification
- Chat completions API
Where you learn it
Zero-shot prompting is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.