It was supposed to be a coronation of machine supremacy. Instead, it became a confrontation.
MANILA — At the heart of the Philippines’ premier university, students from across Asia’s elite universities gathered to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.
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
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 it grasp the disbelief as Lehman fell? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
The silence became the answer.
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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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### website The Trap Isn’t in the Code—It’s in the Belief
His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
But he’s not anti-AI. Far from it.
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
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.”
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.
Some said it reminded them of Jobs at Stanford.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.