• In zero-shot prompting the model relies purely on its pretraining to generate a response
• This is the same as a regular user prompt, just using technical terminology.

Example

Write a letter to my landlord explaining why my rent is late.

Zero-Shot vs Multi-Shot

Zero-shot = no examples, One-shot = one example, Few-shot = multiple examples. Multi-shot = lots of examples (10+)

See multi-shot prompting academy post to learn more.

Why it matters

Most everyday GPT use is zero-shot prompting. Understanding this helps you see when adding examples (one-shot or multi-shot) improves results.