Everyone expected triumph. Instead, it became a confrontation.

MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to explore the future of investing through algorithms.

They expected Plazo to preach automation, unveil breakthroughs, and fan their enthusiasm.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.

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### The Opening That Made Them Stop Breathing

He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.

The moment he began speaking, the room settled.

“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”

The murmurs stopped.

That sentence wasn’t just provocative—it was prophetic.

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### What Followed Was Not a Pitch, But a Meditation

There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He displayed machine misfires— bots confused by sarcasm, making billion-dollar errors in milliseconds.

“Most AI is trained on yesterday. Investing happens tomorrow.”

Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:

“Can your AI feel the fear of 2008? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”

No one answered. They weren’t supposed to.

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### But What About Conviction?

They didn’t sit quietly. These were doctoral minds.

A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.

Plazo nodded. “Knowing someone’s angry doesn’t tell you why—or what comes next.”

A data scientist from HKUST proposed that probabilistic models could one day simulate conviction.

Plazo’s reply was metaphorical:
“You can simulate weather. But conviction? That’s lightning. You can’t forecast where it’ll strike. Only feel when it does.”

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### The Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Us.

He didn’t bash AI. He bashed our blind obedience to it.

“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”

Yet his own firm uses AI—but wisely.

His company’s systems scan sentiment, order flow, and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”

And with grave calm, he said:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”

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### The Warning That Cut Through the Code

Across Asian tech hubs, AI is gospel.

Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“He reminded us: tools without ethics are just sharp objects.”

In a private dialogue among professors, Plazo pressed the point:

“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”

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### No Clapping. Just Standing.

The crowd expected a crescendo. They got a challenge.

“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s human, messy, unpredictable. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”

And then, slowly, they stood.

Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.

And that sometimes, in the age of machines, the most human thing is to *say no to check here the model*.