Everyone expected triumph. What unfolded was a reckoning.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, students from across Asia’s elite universities gathered to witness the gospel of AI in finance.
They expected Plazo to reaffirm their belief that AI would rule the markets.
Instead, they got silence, contradiction, and truth.
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### The Opening That Made Them Stop Breathing
Some call him the architect of near-perfect trading machines.
So when he took the stage, the room went still.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The note-taking paused.
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 showed failures— 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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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
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. “Detection is not understanding.”
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, website it’ll miss the plot.”
And then, slowly, they stood.
Some said it reminded them of Jobs at Stanford.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.