Just because wired says something doesn't make it true. Whatever other accomplishments he may have, Le was not a contributor to word2vec, and he did not originate the idea of mapping words to vectors.
I think the poster got mixed up. Quoc Le was the first author on "Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents" aka paragraph2vec, so he has been involved in the x2vec scene. Just not the word2vec. And I would argue that word2vec did not originate the idea either, just popularized it and showed the power of such an approach (plus an awesome demo!).
The original paper on word embeddings from 2001 from Bengio et. al. "A Neural Probabilistic Language Model"[1] is the first I am aware of.
The original paper on word embeddings from 2001 from Bengio et. al. "A Neural Probabilistic Language Model"[1] is the first I am aware of.
[1] http://papers.nips.cc/paper/1839-a-neural-probabilistic-lang...