An even more tantalizing result by the prolific Rafael and Yanyi is the following paper [1] which discusses how to relate the existence of one-way functions to the assumption that BPP \neq EXP (two classes).
If you spend the time understanding just the statement of their result in that paper, you get to an eerily small gap between "heuristic algorithms" for a version of the time-bounded K-complexity, and "errorless" versions of it.
Their line of research has been even more inspiring than this very well-written quanta article suggests.