Relative to his level of fame, his actual level of contribution as far as pushing forward AI, I’m not so sure about.
I deeply appreciate his educational content and I’m glad that it has led to a way for him to gain influence and sustain a career. Hopefully he’s rich enough from that that he can focus 100% on educational stuff!
He lead a team of one of the most common uses of DNNs, if that isn't 'pushing AI forward', I think you're confused. It's certainly pushing it forward quite a bit more than the publishing game where 99% of the papers are ignored by the people actually building real applications of AI.