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.