A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted." and he said

Humanity has prevailed (for now!)

On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled "Humans vs AI." Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.

The competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. Dębiak's acknowledgment that humanity prevailed "for now" suggests he recognizes this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines.

Coding marathon tests human endurance against AI efficiency
The AtCoder World Tour Finals represents one of competitive programming's most exclusive events, inviting only the top 12 programmers worldwide based on their performance throughout the previous year. The Heuristic division focuses on "NP-hard" optimization problems. In programming, heuristics are problem-solving techniques that find good-enough solutions through shortcuts and educated guesses when perfect answers would take too long to calculate.

All competitors, including OpenAI, were limited to identical hardware provided by AtCoder, ensuring a level playing field between human and AI contestants. According to the contest rules, participants could use any programming language available on AtCoder, with no penalty for resubmission but a mandatory five-minute wait between submissions.

The final contest results showed Psyho finishing with a score of 1,812,272,558,909 points, while OpenAI's model (listed as "OpenAIAHC") scored 1,654,675,725,406 points—a margin of roughly 9.5 percent. OpenAI's artificial entrant, a custom simulated reasoning model similar to o3, placed second overall, ahead of 10 other human programmers who had qualified through year-long rankings.

OpenAI characterized the second-place finish as a milestone for AI models in competitive programming. "Models like o3 rank among the top-100 in coding/math contests, but as far as we know, this is the first top-3 placement in a premier coding/math contest," a company spokesperson said in an email to Ars Technica. "Events like AtCoder give us a way to test how well our models can reason strategically, plan over long time horizons, and improve solutions through trial and error—just like a human would."

AI coding on the rise
Coding is one of the most frequent uses of chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, and tools such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have become standard tools for many professional developers, with a 2024 GitHub survey showing that over 90 percent of developers now use AI coding tools in their workflow, although a recent study suggested that AI assistance might not save developers as much time as they think they do.

Even so, as AI models continue to grow more capable at tasks like coding, Dębiak's victory feels less like a permanent triumph and more like a notable data point in a longer trajectory.

"Honestly, the hype feels kind of bizarre," Dębiak said on X. "Never expected so many people would be interested in programming contests."

For now, that human ability to find unexpected approaches remains unique. But as OpenAI and other companies continue refining their models, future AtCoder contestants may find themselves competing less against AI and more alongside it—or not at all.