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Prompting Updated 2026

Prompt

The input text you give a model to elicit a response. Phrasing, examples and structure strongly affect the quality of the output.

A prompt is the instruction and context handed to a model at inference time. Because large models perform in-context learning (Brown et al., 2020), the prompt — not retraining — is the primary way most users steer behaviour. The systematic study of this is surveyed by Liu et al. (2023).

Effective prompts state the task clearly, supply relevant context or examples, and specify the desired format. Small wording changes can meaningfully shift results.

References

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

Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing
Liu, P., Yuan, W., Fu, J., Jiang, Z., Hayashi, H., & Neubig, G. (2023). ACM Computing Surveys, 55(9), 1–35.
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. "Prompt." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/prompt

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.

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