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at the atcoder world tour finals 2025 in tokyo, polish coder and mind sports champion przemysław dębiak, known online as psyho, narrowly defeated openai’s ai contender. despite the win, he believes it may be the last human victory in the prestigious competition, given ai’s rapid development.
“that’s likely,” said the 41-year-old former openai engineer. “i enjoy these contests, so it’s frustrating to imagine a machine doing it better than me.”
there’s a certain irony in his situation—having once worked on developing ai, he now competes against it. “before the contest, i tweeted: ‘live by the sword, die by the sword,’” he said. “even though i won this time, it feels temporary.”
the competition's heuristic division featured 11 top-ranked human coders and an ai built by openai. the ai finished second, just 9.5% behind psyho’s score. openai ceo sam altman congratulated him on x.
the 10-hour challenge revolved around solving a tough optimization problem, similar to the well-known “traveling salesman” puzzle—simple to explain, but extremely complex to solve efficiently. while ai tools like chatgpt excel at generating basic code, solving open-ended logic problems still heavily favors human intuition and reasoning.
“at this stage, elite humans are still better at deep reasoning,” psyho explained. “but we're limited by how fast we can type, while ai can make countless small tweaks in parallel.”
he compared ai’s approach to “cloning a human and having them work simultaneously,” noting that speed and scale often outweigh individual brilliance.
as major tech companies like meta and microsoft embrace ai-driven code generation, concerns grow over its impact on jobs. in may, anthropic ceo dario amodei predicted ai could replace 20% of white-collar roles within five years.
“every profession is feeling the shift,” said psyho. “white-collar jobs are already being affected. manual labor is next—though robotics still lags behind.”
psyho, like many in tech, feels conflicted about ai’s potential. “we’re facing big issues—disinformation, societal impact, even people struggling to find meaning,” he said. “historically, society evolves slowly. but technology is accelerating faster than ever.”