AI hasn't killed coding stars yet.
On Wednesday, Polish programmer PrzemysławDbiak defeated Openai tools at the Atcoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic Contest in Tokyo sponsored by the company.
“I was very tired. In fact, I felt I should take a break,” DęBiak, who competed under the name “Psyho,” told Business Insider about the video call on Friday.
“But at the same time, I was very close to getting a score comparable to the model,” he added.
It led him to delve deeper into using “all the rest of the energy” to beat AI. “I'm trying to give you 100% of what I have and try to live on,” he says, adding that without Openai's model, his score is “a lot lower, much lower.”
Dobiac's victory attracted the attention of Openai CEO Sam Altman. In X's post on Wednesday, Altman wrote, “Good Job Psyho.”
When I reached for the comment, Openai instructed BI to post X. “Our model came in second in the Atcoder Heuristics World Finals! Congratulations to the champion who held us down this time,” he wrote.
The contest is held every year and is run by Atcoder, a competitive programming website based in Japan.
Ywata, the manager of the competition, told BI that Openai's model is better than those who used a similar approach, but Debiak “reached a completely different solution.”
“We hope that humans will win and we were pretty surprised that AI can take second place,” Iwata added.
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“AI has outperformed humans in terms of optimization capabilities, but I believe that it has not yet reached human creativity.”
The contest results page shows Dobiac, who has won more than his competitors in Japan, Georgia and France. On Friday, DęBiak shared the results page for X, showing him second place as the winner of the competition and Openai.
“The results are now official, and my lead has increased from 5.5% to 9.5% over AI,” he writes.
After winning the competition on Wednesday, Dębiak celebrated the victory online, writing “Humanity has won (for now!)” and adding that he was “completely exhausted” after just 10 hours of sleep in three days. He told Bee he flew from Warsaw to Tokyo.
The programmer writes that X does not use AI tools and does not use “regular” Visual Studio code, a software development platform.
Dobiac, 41, only knew about Openai's entry a week before the contest.
“No one knew this would be a human-AI exhibition match to some extent,” he said.
The stars lined up for humans
AI wins when you need simple engineering (implementing algorithms, solving problems, optimizing your code).
However, he said that in a long contest where programmers “do it all from scratch”, AI is struggling to catch up.
“The longer the competition, the more human chances and the less chances of AI,” he said, adding that he overtook Openai's tools near the end of the 10-hour competition.
Debiak said he competed for “algorithm optimization.” Here, my goal was to write the most efficient solution to complex problems. In this race, he had to code a program that would guide the robot into a 30×30 grid using as little movement as possible.
Looking back at the competition, Dobiac said the variables lined up in his favour.
“It's easy to imagine another problem where AI wins and all humans are far and far,” he added.
AI is famous for hitting beats on humans in other famous competitions. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue AI machine defeated Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov, and in 2016, it defeated Google Deepmind's Alphago Beat Go World Champion Lee Sedol.
In February, Altman said by the end of the year that Openai could outperform people in competitive coding.
AI is already writing big chunks of code in Microsoft, Google and Meta.
Altman says the demand for software engineers could ultimately immerse them.
“My basic assumption is that each software engineer will do much more for a while, and at some point, yeah, maybe we need fewer software engineers,” he said in March.
