Artificial Intelligence (AI) has overwhelmed humanity with chess, poker and go, but when it comes to competitive coding, humans still have an advantage.
Earlier this month, Polish coder and mind sports champion Przemysław Dębiak secured a victory over Openai participants at Atcoder World Tour Finals 2025.
After winning the competition, an elite coder named Psycho predicted that he could be the last person to win this prominent title, as technological advancements outweigh human ingenuity.
“That's probably because I like these competitions and know there's this magical entity that can make me a little more annoyed than I do,” said Psycho, who previously worked at Openai.
The nature of competition
The Atcoder competition included 11 human participants invited based on world rankings and coding algorithms designed by Openai.
The 10-hour contest involved solving complex optimization problems characterized by “travel salesman problems,” where salesmen need to find the best solution.
AI finished second, falling 9.5% behind Psycho.
Do humans always have an advantage in competitive coding?
Given the pace of AI's progress, it is not difficult to imagine that in the near future AI will dominate humanity even if it codes a showdown.
Psycho said: “In our current state, humans are still far better at inference and solving complex problems.” However, humans are bottlenecked by how fast they can enter and decode the code compared to the turbocharged speed and efficiency of AI.
“AI may not be the smartest thing right now, but it is definitely the fastest. And sometimes increasing the average person over and over will have better results than a single special person,” he added.
Winning followed a major change as major tech giants, including Microsoft and Meta, employ AI to write code.
Humanity CEO Dario Amody predicts that AI will be able to surpass 20% of white-collar jobs in the next five years.
In response to this prediction, Psycho has made it clear that AI moments have led to more or less all occupations. “There are people who have all the white collar jobs coming right now, but because of manual work, robotics is a few years behind,” he said.
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