In a groundbreaking event at the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 in Tokyo, Polish programmer Przemyslaw Debiak, a former OpenAI employee known as “Psycho”, beat an AI model in a grueling 10-hour coding competition.
Despite being severely sleep-deprived (only 10 hours of sleep in 3 days), Debiak secured a 9.5% lead over the AI. The contest focused on solving a single complex optimization problem a test of endurance, logic, and real-time strategic thinking.
This marks one of the first instances where an AI directly competed with elite human programmers in a live global coding event. The AI did outperform all other human participants, but Debiak emerged as the sole human victor.