The scene was set for celebration. 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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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox

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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### Dismantling the Myth of Machine Supremacy

There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He showed failures— neural nets falling apart under real-world pressure.

“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*.”

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.”

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.”

Later, in a faculty roundtable, Plazo pressed the point:

“Don’t website 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.