NYTimes is positively in love with him, are a few other articles - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-int... ... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa...
He was on one of the first backprop papers, worked pretty consistently on neural nets though the AI winter, and was pretty instrumental in the renaissance.
Was he the only person working on this stuff? No, but I think we as a society like to tell ourselves a story about science and scientists. The narrative of the “lone scientist” wiling away their days in solitude until reaching a breakthrough probably hasn’t actually existed since the 19th century. Pretty much all significant discoveries nowadays are the product of intense collaboration and iterative progress. Science is a team sport, just one where 99% of the team happens to be invisible.
There are countless articles that romanticize entrepreneurs who were child chess champions, or rubik's cube solving geniuses, who dropped out of college, or were academics who were under-acknowledged, only to build it all by themselves and hit the jackpot. At least that's how the story often goes. It almost seems like a sort of modern mythology, one that taps into the American dream that so many yearn for.