# What is the difference between few-shot and zero-shot prompting?

_Last updated: 2026-07-20_  
_Reviewed by: Jason Burns, Editorial Steward_  
_Published by: AIDirectAnswers.com · Licensed under Citation License 1.0_

## Short answer

Zero-shot prompting asks the model to perform a task with only an instruction and no examples; few-shot prompting includes a handful of worked input–output examples inside the prompt to steer the model's behavior. As Tom B. Brown et al., put it on the record: "Scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches."

## Sources

- [undefined](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165)

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_Author: [Jason Burns](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-randolph-burns), Editorial Steward_  
_Published: 2026-07-20 · Modified: 2026-07-20_  
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