Zero-shot is an AI capability: the model performs a task with no examples, just the instruction. Tech jargon. Not concerning. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.
zero-shot
An LLM correctly performing a task with zero training examples — just natural-language instructions.
ˈzɪə.roʊ ʃɒtCoined ~20232020sGen AlphatrendingCurrent290 viewsLast reviewed Jun 29, 2026＋ Add a definition
Seen in the wild
3 citations · last seen May 2026
Etymology timeline
Born ~2023 · 1 year of recorded useSeen in the wild
BlueskyMay 2026
Ruichu Cai, Juntao Gan, Miao Mai, Zhifeng Hao, Boyan Xu SAM-NER: Semantic Archetype Mediation for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03706
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BlueskyMay 2026
During a startup competition a guy on my team tried to zero-shot an entire deck in Slides. The less said about the output, the better.
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BlueskyMay 2026
In real-world zero-shot tests on a Franka robot, MolmoAct 2 outperforms strong proprietary models on every task we evaluated, including placing an apple on a plate, moving a pipette to a tray, and a longer multi-step…
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Wikipedia: Zero-shot learning
Zero-shot methods generally work by associating observed and non-observed classes through some form of auxiliary information, which encodes observable distinguishing properties of objects.
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Wikipedia: Zero-shot learning
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a problem setup in deep learning where, at test time, a learner observes samples from classes which were not observed during training, and needs to predict the class that they belong to.
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Definitions
Global
+534100%
#1·Apr 24, 2026Global
An LLM correctly performing a task with zero training examples — just natural-language instructions. "Few-shot" is the same with a handful of examples.
"Zero-shot translation between Hindi and Swahili actually worked — surprising."
Origin: AI / developer industry term, 2023–2025.
For parents
Zero-shot is an AI capability: the model performs a task with no examples, just the instruction. Tech jargon. Not concerning. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.
For ESL learners
Zero-shot is a machine-learning term meaning a model performs a task without any task-specific training examples, relying only on the instruction. Use in AI engineering and research writing. Formal equivalent: "zero-shot inference," "zero-shot learning." Common non-native mistake: confusing with one-shot or few-shot (which provide examples). Always hyphenated. Read or listen to the word in context several times before trying it yourself; the right register is harder to learn than the dictionary meaning.
Cluster: ai_specific
Heard in the wild
“Ruichu Cai, Juntao Gan, Miao Mai, Zhifeng Hao, Boyan Xu SAM-NER: Semantic Archetype Mediation for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03706”
— Bluesky· May 2026“During a startup competition a guy on my team tried to zero-shot an entire deck in Slides. The less said about the output, the better.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“In real-world zero-shot tests on a Franka robot, MolmoAct 2 outperforms strong proprietary models on every task we evaluated, including placing an apple on a plate, moving a pipette to a tray, and a longer multi-step task with several objects.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Zero-shot methods generally work by associating observed and non-observed classes through some form of auxiliary information, which encodes observable distinguishing properties of objects.”
“Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a problem setup in deep learning where, at test time, a learner observes samples from classes which were not observed during training, and needs to predict the class that they belong to.”
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Show 1 more dictionary-style sense (imported)
Global
#2·May 2, 2026Global
Relating to zero-shot learning; performing without specialized training data.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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For specific readers
Why is this section here?
Slang is read by different audiences for very different reasons. The For parents view re-explains the term in plain, non-judgemental language so a caregiver can understand what their child means without needing the surrounding subculture. The For English learners view focuses on register (when it's safe to use), formal alternatives, and common mistakes — what a textbook won't teach you.
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Semantically related
- few-shot78%
Giving an LLM a handful of input/output examples in the prompt before asking it to handle a new case. A cheap alternative to fine-tuning. "Few-shot examples in the prompt boosted accuracy by 15%." For complex tasks, three good examples often outperform a 200-word system prompt.
- few-shot67%
A machine learning paradigm where a model is trained on a very small amount of data, typically less than that required for traditional machine learning approaches.
- prompt engineering64%
The craft of writing inputs to LLMs to reliably produce the output you want. Includes role-setting, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought, and careful phrasing.
- chain of thought60%
Prompting or training technique where an LLM produces intermediate reasoning steps before the final answer, dramatically improving accuracy on multi-step problems.