Zero-shot works because large language models acquired a broad understanding of language and tasks during training. The prompt contains only the instruction itself, such as translate this sentence into French. For simple, well-defined tasks, zero-shot often already delivers good results. For more complex or stylistically sensitive tasks, adding examples (few-shot) usually improves quality considerably.
Zero-Shot Prompting
Zero-shot prompting means giving an AI model a task with no examples at all, relying entirely on its pre-trained knowledge. Modern models already handle many tasks reliably this way.