Everyone expected triumph. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.
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 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 models,” he said, “are just statistical mirrors of the past.
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
Of course, the audience pushed back.
A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models more info 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
His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.
“Some traders no longer read. No longer think. They just wait for signals.”
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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### Why This Message Stung Harder in the East
In Asia, automation is often sacred.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“This was theology, not technology.”
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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### 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.”
The room froze.
It wasn’t ovation. It was reverence.
Plazo didn’t come to praise AI.