When reached for comment, OpenAI directed BI to a post on X, where it had written, “Our model took 2nd place at the AtCoder Heuristics World Finals! Congrats to the champion for holding us off this time.”<\/p>\n
The contest is held annually and run by AtCoder, a Japan-based competitive programming site.<\/p>\n
Yoichi Iwata, the competition’s administrator, told BI that OpenAI’s model outperformed those who used similar approaches, but D\u0119biak “arrived at a completely different solution.”<\/p>\n
“We expected a human to win, and were rather surprised that the AI was able to secure second place,” Iwata added.<\/p>\n
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“While the AI surpassed humans in terms of optimization ability, we believe it still fell short of human creativity.”<\/p>\n
The competition’s results page<\/a> shows D\u0119biak prevailing over competitors from Japan, Georgia, and France. On Friday, D\u0119biak shared<\/a> a results page on X that showed him as the competition’s victor and OpenAI in second place.<\/p>\n “The results are official now and my lead over AI increased from 5.5% to 9.5%,” he wrote.<\/p>\n Update: I’m alive and well<\/p>\n The results are official now and my lead over AI increased from 5.5% to 9.5%\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n Honestly, the hype feels kind of bizarre. Never expected so many people would be interested in programming contests. Guess this means I should drop in here more often\ud83d\udc40 pic.twitter.com\/RsLD8lECNq<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Psyho (@FakePsyho) July 17, 2025<\/a> <\/p>\n After winning the competition on Wednesday, D\u0119biak celebrated his win online, writing, “Humanity has prevailed (for now!)”, adding that he was “completely exhausted” after just 10 hours of sleep in three days. He told BI he flew from Warsaw to Tokyo for the competition.<\/p>\n The programmer wrote on X that he did not use AI tools, just “regular” Visual Studio Code, a software development platform, with “some basic autocomplete to speed up repetitive stuff.”<\/p>\n D\u0119biak, 41, told BI he only found out about OpenAI’s entry a week before the contest.<\/p>\n “No one knew that this would be, to some extent, an exhibition match between humans and AI,” he said.<\/p>\n The stars aligned for the human<\/p>\n AI will win in cases that require straightforward engineering \u2014 implementing algorithms, solving the problem, and optimizing code \u2014 because it’s simply faster, D\u0119biak told BI.<\/p>\n But in longer contests where programmers “do everything from scratch,” he said, AI has a harder time keeping up.<\/p>\n “The longer the contest is, the more chances for humans and less chances for AI,” he said, adding that he overtook OpenAI’s tool near the end of the 10-hour competition.<\/p>\n D\u0119biak said he competed in “algorithmic optimization,” where the goal was to write the most efficient solution to a complex problem. In this competition, he had to code a program that guided robots across a 30×30 grid using the fewest moves possible.<\/p>\n Reflecting on the competition, D\u0119biak said the variables lined up in his favor.<\/p>\n “It’s easy to imagine a different problem where AI would win and all the humans would be like far, far away,” he added.<\/p>\n AI has famously beaten humans in other high-profile competitions. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue AI machine beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, and in 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Go world champion Lee Sedol.<\/p>\n In February, Altman said that by the end of the year, OpenAI could surpass humans in coding competitions.<\/p>\n AI is already writing big chunks of code at Microsoft, Google, and Meta<\/a>, the companies’ CEOs have all said in recent months.<\/p>\n