AI: On Launch Day, Five Markets Searched Not for Features
On 22 September, the day the new model launched, I opened the chat box, wrote half a question, then stopped and deleted it. Because I realised what I wanted was not an answer but a sentence saying "there's nothing wrong with what you're doing."
What ranked on the trending searches that day was mostly the names of AI (artificial intelligence) — the Spanish-language market searched ChatGPT and Gemini, the Portuguese-language market searched Gemini and "superintelligence," the Korean-language market searched Gemini written in Korean, the English-language market and the Taiwan region of China searched the version number of the newly launched build. A product release of course brings searches, but I was curious about something else: once people finish searching, what is the first question they ask.
Drawing a lot and asking a question have the same structure
Anyone who has drawn a lot at a temple knows the flow: first think the question through in your mind, give your name and the matter, shake the tube, throw the moon blocks (jiaobei), receive a lot, then find someone to interpret it. The whole set has three key points — one question, one external source, one sentence that can be read as a direction.
On the chat-box side it is isomorphic: you type in a sentence, it gives you a reply. The only difference is how the reply is produced: one side relies on the grading of the lot poems and the interpreter's experience, the other on a language model's calculation over context and probability.
So the question is not "which side works better," but which of these things you are actually asking for:
| What you want | Where it fits better |
|---|---|
| An actionable, concrete conclusion | A contingency plan, a checklist, other people's experience |
| An explanatory framework to think with | Divination, lot poems, symbolic systems |
| A feeling of being heard | Both can give it, but neither promises an outcome |
The earlier piece on this site, Can AI Tell Fortunes: A Conversation Between Algorithms and Divination, asked "can it?"; this piece asks only about structure — why a person needs an answer from outside, and where that answer actually comes from.
Is it a "yes" you need, or a set of explanations
I later went back and looked at the half question I had deleted. It actually held two parts: one concrete choice, and an expectation of being approved. The first can be looked up, asked about, weighed as pros and cons; the second only you can give.
Once that became clear, my sense of where divination sits changed too: it is better suited to the second part — putting your situation into a set of symbols, so you can see where you stand and what is around you. To ask "will this work out," the one-question-one-answer manner is the best fit: Liu Yao Divination: Casting Steps and Reading Basics is about exactly that; and if you want to understand first how the lot poems are graded and read, San Shan Guo Wang Ling Qian: How to Draw and Read a Lot covers the whole process.
Closing
I finished writing that half question and pressed send. It came back with a very decent answer; I read it twice and closed it. The "it's fine" I was waiting for inside never arrived — probably that sentence can only be said by yourself.
If you also have half a sentence left unasked, on 占卜迷指 it works like this: you describe your trouble in natural language, the system recommends a suitable method, casts the chart and gives a reading, and you can export it to keep and compare against slowly.
Information current as of 23 September 2026 (China Standard Time).
Sources
- Anthropic: official introduction and system card for Claude Opus 5.5 (released 2026-09-22)
- TechCrunch (2026-09-22): Anthropic releases Opus 5.5
- Google Trends trending searches (Spanish / Portuguese / Korean / English / Taiwan region of China markets, 22–23 September 2026, 24 / 48 / 168-hour windows; platform magnitude estimates, not precise search volumes)
(The trending terms are recorded only as a phenomenon; no factual claim is made here about any model's version or features.)
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