They’re fundamentally different since the standard definition of a VDF is strictly non-parallelizable and P/o/W is generally designed to be “embarrassingly parallel.”

It may seem like a minor subtlety but the resulting dynamics are dramatically different. For a VDF it doesn’t matter if you have 1 machine churning away or 1000 machines churning away, it will take you the same amount of time to finish the calculation.

It’s like that but usually to decrypt something where the output of a verifiable delay function is a key.

It's a fancy way of saying magic beans.