From a post about the supposed Faster Fourier Transform OpenAI result.

This new OpenAI result is thus less a mathematical breakthrough and more an oddity of computer scientists being bad at formalizing their design specifications. The “theoretical” definition of a computer is very far removed from the computers we actually build. The “faster” Fourier transform is merely an example where theory gets so unmoored from the original question that an “open problem” becomes nothing more than an academic status puzzle. The solution is like what happens when you set computational bot streams at impossible problems and find them engaging in illegal hacking.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

Reminds me of a quote popularly attributed to Edgar Dijkstra: computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Whether Dijkstra actually said it or not, it resonates with computer science theory people in the sense that their focus is on computation minus the machine. Computer science theory has inherited the purity, prestige, hierarchy from mathematics, who do not have this problem as the models are their subjects.