Computers have won crowns in chess, go and poker, but humans still have an advantage when it comes to competitive coding.
Polish coder and mind sports champion PrzemysławDbiak won the Openai participants at the Atcoder World Tour Finals 2025 held in Tokyo earlier this month. But the elite coder going by Psyho's online name predicts that, given the incredible pace of technological advancements, he could be the last person to win an honorable title.
“That's a good chance,” said Psyho, 41, who worked at Openai before retiring five years ago. “Because I like these competitions and know there's this magical entity that can make me a little more annoyed than I do.”
The fact that coders contribute to their professional end is acknowledged to be ironic.
“Before the contest, I tweeted, 'Live with the sword, die with the sword,'” he said. “I helped develop AI. I'll be the one who's going to loser in the match. In the end, I won for now.”
The Atcoder Euristic Division included 11 human participants invited based on world rankings and coding algorithms designed by Openai. Openai CEO Sam Altman tweeted congratulations.
The 10-hour contest involves solving complex optimization problems. A classic in this genre is “the problem of travel salesmen,” and salesmen need to know the shortest possible routes between the different cities they have visited once. These issues can be easily mentioned, but finding the best solution is computationally very complicated. Therefore, ChatGpt is routinely used to write boilerplate code, but AI's performance on open-ended logic problems is considered impressive.
“In our current state, humans who make clear – humans are still far better at inference and solving complex problems,” Psyho said. However, humans are “bottlenecked” at the speed at which they can enter codes, but AI can try out many small adjustments very quickly.
“This model is like cloning a single person multiple times and working in parallel,” he said. “AI may not be the smartest thing right now, but it's definitely the fastest. And sometimes multiplying one average person over and over again will result in better results than a single special person.”
As a result, major tech companies, including Meta and Microsoft, are turning their eyes to AI to write software code. Humanity CEO Dario Amodei said in May that AI could account for 20% of white-collar jobs in the next 1-5 years.
“Now, every profession has this more or less this,” Psyho says. “Some people now do all the white collar jobs. Because of manual work, robotics is a few years behind.”
Like many in the industry, Psyho is ambiguous about the potential impact of a stronger AI model than ever before. “We have a lot of problems,” he said. “Disinformation, social influence, people who have no purpose in life. Historically, society has moved at a very slow pace. Technological advances are moving at a faster, faster pace now.”
