The scene was set for celebration. What unfolded was a reckoning.
MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.
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.
It challenged everything the crowd believed.
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### A Lecture or a Lament?
Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He displayed machine misfires—algorithms buying at peaks, shorting at troughs, mistaking irony for euphoria.
“These systems are reflections—not predictions.”
Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:
“Can your AI feel the fear of 2008? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
You could hear a breath fall.
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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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### When Faith Replaces Thinking
Plazo’s core argument wasn’t that AI is broken. It’s that humans are outsourcing responsibility.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
Yet his own firm uses AI—but wisely.
His company’s click here systems scan sentiment, order flow, and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”
Then came the killer line:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
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### Asia’s Enthusiasm, Interrupted
Nowhere does AI have more believers than Asia.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“What Plazo gave us was oxygen in a burning house.”
Later, in a faculty roundtable, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
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### The Closing Words That Didn’t Feel Like Tech
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “It’s a novel. 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 the model*.