At a gathering of bright young minds from the region’s top universities, Joseph Plazo—AI investor and founder of Plazo Sullivan Roche Capital—offered not hype, but hesitation.

MANILA — the atmosphere inside AIM’s lecture hall was not electric, but charged—with thought.

Plazo, a man whose trading systems are trusted by institutional investors across continents and have posted almost mechanical consistency, did not arrive to dazzle.

“Speed is nothing without direction.”

???? **The Code Breaker Who Stopped to Ask Why**

He doesn’t throw stones from the sidelines. He built the bots that move the markets.

Which makes his unease all the more compelling.

“What machines optimise, humans must justify.”

He referenced an early pandemic incident: an AI under his firm flagged a short trade on gold—right before central bank intervention reversed market expectations.

“We stopped it. The model was technically sound—but contextually catastrophic.”

???? **The Case for Slowness in a Market That Won’t Wait**

Plazo warned against the growing cultural obsession with speed—particularly in finance.

“Friction slows execution, but gives space for reflection.”

He introduced a three-question model he calls **Conviction Calculus**—a checklist not for technical performance, but for ethical clarity:

- Is this trade aligned with the values of the firm—or just its ambition?
- Is this merely a technical position—or a real-world one?
- Are we prepared to own this trade, even if it fails?

???? **Asia’s AI Boom—and the Accountability Gap**

The investment in algorithmic systems is massive, and largely unregulated.

Plazo asked a harder question: “The software is evolving—but is the oversight?”

In get more info 2024, two Hong Kong hedge funds collapsed after AI-driven trades missed geopolitical shifts.

“We created tools that don’t know how to say no.”

???? **Beyond the Bot: Plazo’s Push for Narrative AI**

Plazo isn’t calling for a retreat from technology.

He is instead building what he terms **“narrative-integrated AI”**—systems that assess not just numbers, but context, tone, and geopolitical undercurrents.

“We don’t need smarter machines. We need more conscious ones.”

Several venture capitalists approached Plazo after his speech.

One called the model:

“What regulation failed to build, this framework might.”

???? **The Next Market Failure May Begin With a Perfectly Executed Mistake**

Plazo closed with a sentence that now circles boardrooms like a quiet echo:

“It won’t be noise that breaks us. It’ll be silence.”

It wasn’t an attack on AI—it was an appeal to remain human.

Because we built the machines. But we still write the stories.