Polish programmer Przemysław Dębiak narrowly defeated an advanced OpenAI model in the Heuristic division of the AtCoder World Tour Finals, held in Tokyo on 16 July. The contest marked the first time an artificial-intelligence system competed directly against elite human coders in the annual event. After a gruelling 10-hour session, Dębiak—competing under the handle “Psyho”—posted a score of 1.812 trillion points, topping the leaderboard ahead of OpenAI’s custom model “OpenAIAHC,” which finished with 1.655 trillion. The 9.5% margin secured Dębiak the ¥500,000 (about US$3,200) first-prize cheque and left the AI in second place, still ahead of the 10 other human finalists. Dębiak, a former OpenAI employee, said the AI’s strong showing pushed him to keep improving his solution despite fatigue from three days of minimal sleep. OpenAI congratulated the winner and framed the model’s runner-up finish as a milestone, noting it was the company’s first top-three result in a premier coding or mathematics contest. The outcome underscores both the rapid progress of generative AI in complex problem-solving and the continued edge human intuition can provide in open-ended tasks. Organisers and participants expect future editions to experiment with mixed human–AI teams as systems like OpenAIAHC close the remaining performance gap.