It's because he is so high profile and a visionary in his field at Apple. Or was. He is merely an early big fish swimming away so expect more as draconian old-school companies try to drag employees back to their cubes.
I think inventing Generative Adversarial Networks, which enable everything from Alexa to GPT-3 to DALL-E to thousands of other models we use today, is pretty visionary to the field of ML.
I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters
Nothing directly. One could argue that GANs did kick-start the boom in generative model research as the first approach in some time that worked in a big way. Either way, certainly Ian is a huge name in ML.