While it might seem like AI models are rapidly overtaking the endeavours of squishy human beings, it appears some hope of staying ahead of our AI overlords may remain. And in this case, that hope is personified by Przemysław Dębiak, a former OpenAI employee who has narrowly beaten one of the company's models in a coding world championship.
Dębiak was competing in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo last week, pitting his coding skills against not only multiple human competitors, but OpenAI's "OpenAIAHC", a custom simulated reasoning model similar to OpenAI o3 (via Ars Technica). The competition involved contestants solving a complex optimisation problem over a 10-hour period, before being scored on their achievements.
