[yorwba]

This seems like a fairly natural generalization of the idea in "The Case for Learned Index Structures" [1]: speed up some classical algorithm based on heuristics by modeling the data with a neural network that can be tuned to the specific task that the general algorithm is applied to.

That said, the O(N) claim is purely sensational. It all depends on being able to determine the distribution parameters with sufficient accuracy in O(N) time, which isn't really guaranteed for all kinds of data you might want to sort.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208