AI stumbles as human coders take lead in competition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has overpowered humanity in chess, poker, and Go, but when it comes to competitive coding, humans still have supremacy.

Earlier this month, Przemysław Dębiak, a Polish coder and mind sports champion, secured victory against OpenAI’s entrant in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025.

The elite coder named Psycho after winning the competition predicted that he may be the last human to win this distinguished title as the technological advancements are going to outpace human ingenuity.

“That’s probable. I would prefer not, mostly because I like these competitions and knowing there is this magical entity that can do it better than me would be a little bit frustrating,” said Psycho who also previously worked at OpenAI.

The nature of competition

The AtCoder competition included 11 human participants invited on the basis of world ranking and a coding algorithm designed by OpenAI.

The 10-hour contest involved solving a complex optimization problem characterized by the “travelling salesman problem” in which the salesman needs to find an optimal solution.

The AI finished second, lagging 9.5 percent behind Psycho.

Will humans always have an edge in competitive coding?

Given the pace of AI progress, it is not hard to imagine that in the near future AI will reign over humanity even in coding showdown.

Psycho said: “At the current state, humans are still much better at reasoning and solving complex problems”. But humans are bottlenecked by how quickly they can type and decipher the codes in comparison to AI’s turbocharging speed and efficiency.

“AI might not be the smartest right now but it’s definitely the fastest. And sometimes multiplying a single average person many many times produces a better result than a single, special human being,” he added.

The victory came on the heels of a major shift as major tech giants including Microsoft and Meta, are employing AI to write the codes. 

The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei has predicted that AI could overtake 20 percent of white-collar jobs in the next 5 years.

Responding to this prediction, Psycho elucidated that the AI moment is coming upon all the professions more or less. “Some people have it coming right now—all of the white collar jobs. However, for manual jobs, robotics is lagging by several years,” he said. 

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