Only 1 programmer in the world could beat OpenAI’s AI

Imagine a world where artificial intelligence competes with the best programmers on the planet. Such a confrontation took place at the prestigious AtCoder World Tour Finals tournament. This is one of the most elite programming competitions in the world, where it’s extremely difficult to get in.

Particularly noteworthy is the Heuristic Division, where problems are solved using heuristic and optimization methods. Here you can’t just solve a problem. You need to do it better than other participants, similar to competitions on the Kaggle platform.

This year the tournament was sponsored by OpenAI company, which received permission to field its AI model to compete on equal terms with humans. The result was disturbing. Only 1 person in the entire world could surpass the OpenAI model.

This person was Polish programmer Przemysław Dębiak, performing under the nickname Psyho. He’s quite well-known in the programming community. Most interesting is that Przemysław claims he didn’t use any AI tools when preparing his solution. But programmed in the regular VSCode environment.

After the competition, the winner wrote, I quote: “Humanity prevailed, for now! I’m completely exhausted. It seemed to me that I slept only 10 hours in the last 3 days, and I’m barely alive”.