University lecturer Wang always thought her son’s name was not properly aligned with his “five elements” — wood, fire, earth, metal and water — potentially causing him trouble in later life.
To fix this, the 34-year-old would once have had to hire an expensive master of “BaZi”, or the Four Pillars of Destiny — the traditional Chinese system of fortune telling.
Today, however, there is DeepSeek, the homegrown AI model whose sympathetic use of the Chinese language has proved surprisingly adept at BaZi — a form of astrology that uses a person’s birth time and other details to determine the balance of five elements and other aspects of their destiny.