Zero-shot
Asking an AI to do a task without giving it any examples of how to do it.
Zero-shot prompting means asking a model to perform a task with no demonstration or example — just an instruction. The model has to rely entirely on what it learned during training to figure out what you want.
Telling someone "translate this sentence into French" without showing them any example translations first. They either know French or they don't. Zero-shot tests what the model already knows without any hand-holding.
Zero-shot doesn't mean the model has never seen the task before. It means you haven't provided examples in your current prompt. The model may have seen millions of similar tasks during training — zero-shot just tests whether that training is sufficient without additional guidance.