DadgogoAI Dictionary

Dictionary entry

few-shot

adjective \ˈfyü ˈshät\
TopicPrompting & Context First known use2020 Senses1
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Definition of few-shot

  1. : done by including a handful of examples in the prompt so the model can copy the pattern, without any retraining

    • Few-shot prompting with five examples fixed the formatting problem.
    • The paper showed that big models are surprisingly good few-shot learners.

Origin & history

first known use2020

Made famous by the 2020 GPT-3 paper, 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners'.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of few-shot?

Related terms

zero-shot done without giving the model any examples, relying only on instructions one-shot done with exactly one example included in the prompt in-context learning a model's ability to pick up a new task from instructions or examples given in the prompt…

Cite this entry

"Few-shot." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/few-shot/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

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