Meet the world's best programmer: A Polish man who beat ChatGPT
Przemysław Dębiak, 42, is the only human in the world to beat ChatGPT in the most prestigious programming competition AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 (Heuristic Division), which was held in Tokyo earlier this month.
The Pole won the elite tournament ahead of 11 other participants, including one particular competitor - a specially prepared algorithm by OpenAI. The company's algorithm ranked in second place. The advantage over ChatGPT grew from an initial 5.5 per cent to a final 9.5, which makes the scale of success all the more remarkable.
"He is a very humble man and is very happy that he managed not only to win, but also to beat OpenAI, where he used to work," - innovation design expert Stanislaw Eysmont, a friend of Debiak's, told Euronews Next.
Psyho: "Humanity has won (so far)!".
The competition lasted ten hours and required participants to solve complex optimisation problems. The task was to improve the designated code as much as possible - optimising it and making it more efficient.
"I am completely exhausted. I realised that I've slept maybe 10 hours in the last three days and I'm barely alive," confessed Debiak in a post on the X social media platform after the results were announced.
He prefaced these words with a significant sentence: "Humanity has won (so far)!".
The Pole's success was also appreciated by OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman. "Good job psyho," he wrote on X.
Stanislaw Eysmont commented on his feat as follows:
"10 hours of intellectual marathon. No ready-made solutions, no documentation, no prompts," said Eysmont.
"There was only one thing: a complex optimisation problem, real in its nature, which cannot be 'solved well' - only better than others. It was in this environment - full of tension, strategy and brilliance - that Przemek beat everyone. Including... the artificial intelligence that came second. Yes. Today, man beats AI".
The world's most elite competition
The AtCoder World Tour Finals is a tournament that experts consider to be the most prestigious competition in the field of so-called programming heuristics. Only the best - the 12 highest-rated programmers in the world - take part. It is not possible to apply for the competition; you may receive an invitation based on the rankings.
The competition involves solving optimisation problems at the highest level of difficulty. It is a combination of algorithmics, statistics, AI theory and creativity. It is not enough to know the algorithms - you still need to be able to use them in a way that even a machine cannot predict.
Secondary education, no full-time job, would-be DJ and poker player
Dębiak was born on 28 July 1983 in Gdynia. He is a multiple winner of international programming competitions and an expert in algorithmics and AI. He is also a member of Mensa and a multiple Polish champion in puzzle solving.
During an AMA session on the Polish website Wykop, he revealed some unusual facts about himself. Among them:
1. "I have never worked a full-time job".
2. "I am a university drop-out, which means I have a de facto secondary education".
3."When I was a kid, I wanted to be a superhero. It didn't work out".
4. "I never had an idea for life and, in fact, I still don't". - he wrote, also adding that at various times he had thought about becoming a game developer, actor, DJ or professional poker player, among other professions.
5. Debiak lives in Poland and said "has no intention of moving away for the time being".
For the Pole, victory could be tantamount to opening up even more professional wickets.
As Eysmont explained, the competition is followed by the world's biggest technology companies and is seen as an indicator of "who really understands how code thinks".
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Euronews
18 minutes ago
- Euronews
Sweden's leader uses ChatGPT. Should politicians use AI chatbots?
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has stirred up public debate over politicians' use of artificial intelligence (AI) after telling local media he uses ChatGPT to brainstorm and seek a 'second opinion' on how to run the country. Kristersson told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri that he uses ChatGPT and the French service LeChat, and that his colleagues also use AI in their everyday work. 'I use it myself quite often, if for nothing else than for a second opinion. 'What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite?' Those types of questions,' he said. The comment sparked backlash, with critics arguing that voters had elected Kristersson, not ChatGPT, to lead Sweden. Technology experts in Sweden have since raised concerns about politicians using AI tools in such a way, citing the risk of making political decisions based on inaccurate information. Large language models' (LLMs) training data can be incomplete or biased, causing chatbots to give incorrect answers or so-called 'hallucinations'. 'Getting answers from LLMs is cheap, but reliability is the biggest bottleneck,' Yarin Gal, an associate professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, previously told Euronews Next. Experts were also concerned about sensitive state information being used to train later models of ChatGPT, which is made by OpenAI. Its servers are based in the United States. Kristersson's press team brushed aside security concerns. 'Of course, it's not security-sensitive information that ends up there. It's used more as a sounding board,' Tom Samuelsson, Kristersson's press secretary, told the newspaper Aftonbladet. Should politicians use AI chatbots? This is not the first time a politician has been placed under fire due to their use of AI – or even the first time in Sweden. Last year, Olle Thorell, a Social Democrat in Sweden's parliament, used ChatGPT to write 180 written questions to the country's ministers. He faced criticism of overburdening ministers' staff, as they are required to answer within a set time frame. Earlier this year, United Kingdom tech secretary Peter Kyle's use of ChatGPT came under fire after the British magazine, New Scientist revealed he had asked the chatbot why AI adoption is so slow in the UK business community and which podcasts he should appear on to 'reach a wide audience that's appropriate for ministerial responsibilities'. Some politicians make no secret of their AI use. In a newspaper column, Scottish Member of Parliament Graham Leadbitter said he uses AI to write speeches because it helps him sift through dense reading and gives him 'a good basis to work from' – but emphasised that he still calls the shots. 'I choose the subject matter, I choose the evidence I want it to access, I ask for a specific type of document, and I check what's coming out accords with what I want to achieve,' Leadbitter wrote in The National. And in 2024, the European Commission rolled out its own generative AI tool, called GPT@EC, to help staff draft and summarise documents on an experimental basis. ChatGPT available to US public servants Meanwhile, OpenAI announced a partnership this week with the US government to grant the country's entire federal workforce access to ChatGPT Enterprise at the nominal cost of $1 for the next year. The announcement came shortly after the Trump administration launched its AI Action Plan, which aims to expand AI use across the federal government to boost efficiency and slash time spent on paperwork, among other initiatives. In a statement, OpenAI said the programme would involve 'strong guardrails, high transparency, and deep respect' for the 'public mission' of federal government workers. The company said it has seen the benefits of using AI in the public sector through its pilot programme in Pennsylvania, where public servants reportedly saved an average of about 95 minutes per day on routine tasks using ChatGPT. 'Whether managing complex budgets, analysing threats to national security, or handling day-to-day operations of public offices, all public servants deserve access to the best technology available,' OpenAI said.
France 24
18 hours ago
- France 24
US government gets a year of ChatGPT Enterprise for $1
Federal workers in the executive branch will have access to ChatGPT Enterprise in a partnership with the US General Services Administration, according to the pioneering San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company. "By giving government employees access to powerful, secure AI tools, we can help them solve problems for more people, faster," OpenAI said in a blog post announcing the alliance. ChatGPT Enterprise does not use business data to train or improve OpenAI models and the same rule will apply to federal use, according to the company. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced an initiative focused on bringing advanced AI tools to US government workers. The news came with word that the US Department of Defense awarded OpenAI a $200 million contract to put generative AI to work for the military. OpenAI planned to show how cutting-edge AI can improve administrative operations, such as how service members get health care, and also has cyber defense applications, the startup said in a post. OpenAI has also launched an initiative to help countries build their own AI infrastructure, with the US government a partner in projects. The tech firm's move to put its technology at the heart of national AI platforms around the world comes as it faces competition from Chinese rival DeepSeek. DeepSeek's success in delivering powerful AI models at a lower cost has rattled Silicon Valley and multiplied calls for US big tech to protect its dominance of the emerging technology. The OpenAI for Countries initiative was launched in June under the auspices of a drive -- dubbed "Stargate" -- announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States. OpenAI, in "coordination" with the US government, will help countries build data centers and provide customized versions of ChatGPT, according to the tech firm.
Euronews
21 hours ago
- Euronews
Meta removes 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to criminal scammers
WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were 'linked to criminal scam' centres targeting people online around that world, its parent company Meta said. The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year, arrive as part of wider company efforts to crack down on scams. In a Tuesday announcement, Meta said it was also rolling new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams, including a new safety overview that the platform will show when someone who is not in a user's contacts adds them to a group, as well as ongoing test alerts to pause before responding. Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today's digital world. Too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempt to steal consumers' information or money, with scams filling our phones, social media, and other corners of the internet each day. Meta noted that 'some of the most prolific' sources of scams are criminal scam centres, which often span from forced labour operated by organised crime – and warned that such efforts often target people on many platforms at once, in attempts to evade detection. That means that a scam campaign may start with messages over text or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, Meta said. Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps – as well as TikTok, Telegram, and AI-generated messages made using ChatGPT – to offer payments for fake likes, to enlist people into a pyramid scheme, or to lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and said it disrupted the campaign in partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
