The scene was set for celebration. Instead, it became a confrontation.

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

There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
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 it grasp the disbelief as Lehman fell? 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 Trap Isn’t in the Code—It’s in the Belief

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.”

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

Across Asian tech hubs, AI is gospel.

Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“What Plazo gave us was oxygen in a burning house.”

That afternoon, over tea and tension, Plazo pressed the point:

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

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### Sermon on the Market

The ending was elegiac, not technical.

“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller—written by humans. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”

No one moved.

Some said it reminded them of Jobs at Stanford.

He came website to remind us: we are still responsible.