🛡️
Session Flagged

Your session has been flagged for unusual activity.

You can try our app by searching for MultipleChat AI on Google and clicking the multiplechat.ai link to try it free.
Quick verification

Please confirm you're human to continue.


Prompting Updated 2026

Few-Shot Prompting

Giving a model a handful of worked examples inside the prompt so it can infer the pattern before answering.

Few-shot prompting places several input–output examples in the context so the model learns the task in-context, without any weight updates. Brown et al. (2020) showed this ability emerges with scale, and that adding a few examples often closes much of the gap to fine-tuned systems for common tasks.

Examples are most useful when the desired format is specific or unusual — exactly the cases where zero-shot tends to wobble.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., et al. (2020). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "Few-Shot Prompting." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/few-shot

Related terms

See this in practice

Run the same prompt across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok — grounded in your own sources, cross-checked against each other.

Try MultipleChat Free

Continue learning

See paid plans