In a packed amphitheater at the University of the Philippines, tech entrepreneur and investment icon Joseph Plazo drew a bold line on what technology can realistically offer for the world of investing—and why that distinction matters now more than ever.

You could feel the electricity in the crowd. Young scholars—some furiously taking notes, others capturing every word via livestream—waited for a man revered for blending code with contrarianism.

“Machines will execute trades flawlessly,” he said with gravity. “But understanding the why—that’s still on you.”

Over the next lecture, Plazo delivered a fast-paced masterclass, balancing data science with real-world decision making. His central claim: AI is brilliant, but blind.

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Bright Minds Confront the Machine’s Limits

Before him sat students and faculty from prestigious universities across Asia, assembled under a pan-Asian finance forum.

Many expected a victory lap of AI's dominance. Instead, they got a reality check.

“There’s a growing religion around AI,” said Prof. Maria Castillo, guest faculty from Europe. “We need this kind of discomfort in academia.”

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Why AI Still Doesn’t Get It

Plazo’s core thesis was both simple and unsettling: AI does not grasp nuance.

“AI won’t flinch, but neither will it foresee,” he warned. “It recognizes patterns—but ignores the more info power structures.”

He cited examples like the market chaos of early 2020, noting, “Machines were late to the signal. People weren’t.”

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Wisdom in a World of Code

Plazo didn’t argue against AI—but for boundaries.

“AI is the telescope—but you are still the astronomer,” he said. It analyzes—but lacks awareness.

Students pressed him on sentiment tracking, to which Plazo acknowledged: “Sure, it can flag Reddit anomalies—but it can’t discern hesitation in a policymaker’s tone.”

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A Mental Shift Among Asia’s Finest

The talk sparked introspection.

“I believed in the supremacy of code,” said Lee Min-Seo, a quant-in-training from South Korea. “Turns out, insight can’t be uploaded.”

In a post-talk panel, tech mentors agreed with his sentiment. “They’ve been raised by data—but instinct,” said Dr. Raymond Tan, “is only half the story.”

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Co-Intelligence: Merging Math with Meaning

Plazo shared that his firm is building “hybrid cognition models”—AI that understands not just volatility, but motive.

“Ethics can’t be outsourced to software,” he reminded. “Judgment remains human territory.”

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The Speech That Started a Thousand Debates

As Plazo exited the stage, students applauded. But more importantly, they lingered.

“I came for machine learning,” said a PhD candidate. “But I got a lesson in human insight.”

And maybe that’s the real power of AI’s limits: they force us to rediscover our own.