After my friend lost his job, he asked AI what came next

When my friend Wei suggested meeting for dinner, I was expecting an update about the woman he started dating a few months ago, the latest in what had until now been a succession of hopeless cases. But as soon as he arrived it was clear he had something else on his mind. “I’ve decided to get a new job,” he said.He was thinking of something that might involve travel, maybe even international travel and more use of his language skills, possibly with a foreign company. I asked him when he had decided to leave his current job at a video games company.“I didn’t want to,” he said.READ MOREThe last time I had seen Wei, he was worried about losing his job, telling me at nearly 40 he didn’t think he would find another one. Now the company had consolidated some of its operations and he was going to spend the next few weeks training someone else to do his work before being laid off.“If I seem upbeat about it, it’s maybe because I got AI to tell my fortune,” he said.He didn’t seem at all upbeat and it turned out that although he used Kimi, one of China’s new, blockbuster AI platforms, the fortunetelling was of the most ancient, traditional variety. He asked Kimi to calculate his Ba Zi (literally, eight characters) horoscope, which has been used since the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century but has its roots a thousand years earlier.The system is based on the year, month, day and hour of your birth, which form four pillars, each of which produces two Chinese characters. The first is one of 10 characters linked to yin or yang and one of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) and the second is also tied to the five elements and to one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac.[ What a Chinese blockbuster says about Beijing’s view of the worldOpens in new window ]The Kimi K3 webpage on a laptop in Hong Kong on Tuesday, July 21, 2026. Photograph: Lam Yik/Bloomberg via Getty Images Wei told me to open Kimi on my phone and to ask it for my Ba Zi, which also required the precise location of my birth and my gender. Within a few seconds, it produced eight characters and a detailed explanation, much of which was too esoteric for me but made perfect sense to him.Then he suggested that I ask it questions, not about my future but about my past and present, which might be easier to verify. We started by asking if travel featured in my life and Kimi told me according to my Ba Zi, I would spend most of my life outside the country of my birth and would live in a number of places.Wei suggested I ask if I was likely to meet famous or important people and the answer was that I would probably do so but that they would not necessarily be my friends. I was more likely to come into contact with them in an impersonal way, what the horoscope described as sudden, situational encounters.All of this reflected the life of a foreign correspondent and as we went deeper, the answers seemed uncannily accurate and the analysis of each decade of life rang true. Better still, when I asked about the future, the prognosis was brilliantly optimistic.When we looked at Wei’s Ba Zi, the picture was bleaker both personally and professionally so it was difficult to see why it should have cheered him up. Then it occurred to me that its main function was to distract him from the news he was dealing with.He had been laid off a few years ago from a different job and it was a few months before he found a new one, so he said he felt better prepared psychologically this time. But he thought being unemployed might mean the end of his budding courtship, not least because the date had been set up by their families and he feared his prospects were an important part of his appeal.[ A police raid on a gay bar, in Asia’s most liberal jurisdictionOpens in new window ]After he left, I sent him a rather feeble message wishing him luck and offering to ask around about jobs if he told me what he was looking for. He replied right away.“Kimi told me not to appear as someone eagerly looking for a job but as an experienced professional looking for bigger opportunities,” he said.