AI Glossary
Zero-shot Learning
What is Zero-shot Learning?
The ability of an AI model to perform a task it has never been explicitly trained on, based solely on the task description. Zero-shot learning is a hallmark capability of large language models — enabling them to write code, translate languages, or analyse documents without any task-specific training examples. It is distinct from few-shot learning, which provides a small number of examples in the prompt.
Example in practice
A professional who asks an AI to classify a list of customer comments as positive, negative, or neutral — without providing any labelled examples — is leveraging zero-shot learning to perform a classification task instantly.
Learn more
See Zero-shot Learning applied in a professional context through this free course.
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