Andrej got famous because of his educational content. He's a smart dude but his research wasn't incredibly unique amongst his cohort at Stanford. He created publicly available educational content around ML that was high quality and got hugely popular. This is what made him a huge name in ML, which he then successfully leveraged into positions of substantial authority in his post-grad career.
He is a very effective communicator and has a lot of people listening to him. And while he is definitely more knowledgeable than most people, I don't think that he is uniquely capable of seeing the future of these technologies.
While I appreciate an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, you can't really use that to ignore everyone's experience and expertise. Sometimes people who have a huge amount of experience and knowledge on a subject do actually make a valid point, and their authority on the subject is enough to make them worth listening to.
Naming things in the context of AI, by someone who is already responsible for naming other things in the context of AI, when they have a lot of valid experience in the field of AI. It's not entirely unreasonable.
Not claiming anything to be false, just a reminder that you should question ones opinion a bit more and not claim they "know what they are talking about" because they worked with Fei-Fei Li. You are outsourcing your thinking to someone else which is lazy and a good way of getting conned.
PHD in neural networks under Fei-Fei Li, founder of OpenAI, director of AI at Tesla, etc. He knows what he's talking about.