Definition
Plain language
Showing a model a handful of examples in the request before asking it to do the real task.
As stated in the literature
In-context learning conditioned on a small number of demonstration examples placed in the prompt; contrasted with zero-shot (no examples) and with fine-tuning (weight updates).
Also called: few shot, few-shot prompting
Why it matters: It matters because a few well-chosen examples can steer a model's behavior without any retraining.
For example, you might paste three sample question-and-answer pairs into a prompt so the model copies that format for the fourth.
Heard on the show
“Reorder your few-shot examples, change the formatting, swap a synonym, and benchmark scores move a point or two.”Episode 243 — How a Hundred Meaningless Word Choices Add Up to Flip a Model's Answer