Zero-shot Prompting

Overview

Zero-shot prompting is a prompting technique that involves generating text without any training on the specific task at hand. Instead, the generative AI system uses a pre-existing language model trained on diverse tasks to generate text for a new task without additional training or fine-tuning. Zero-shot prompting allows for quick and easy adaptation to new tasks without requiring large amounts of task-specific training data.

Most LLMs like GPT-3 are aligned to follow instructions by applying reinforcement learning with human feedback in the loop (RLHF), so zero-shot prompts with relevant context tend to perform incredibly well with these models.