Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and Chain-of-Thought Trade-offs
WHAT IT TESTS: judgment about prompting strategies. OUTLINE: zero-shot is cheap but weak on reasoning, few-shot adds demos at token cost, CoT boosts multi-step accuracy but spends the most tokens and latency.
WHAT IT TESTS: ability to reason about accuracy, cost, and latency across prompting styles. ANSWER OUTLINE: zero-shot is cheapest and lowest latency but often fails multi-step reasoning. Few-shot adds in-context examples that improve format and accuracy at the cost of extra input tokens. Chain-of-thought elicits explicit intermediate steps, markedly improving multi-step reasoning, but generates many more output tokens, raising cost and latency most.
Read the original → interview
- #prompt-engineering
- #chain-of-thought
- #few-shot
- #zero-shot
- #llm
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