Quoc Le is neither an author of the word2vec paper or in the committers list of word2vec software (there's only two committers, mikolov and sutskever). Not sure where you got that inference from.
At Google, he helped develop a system that essentially maps words into vectors. And according to Google, this work would later feed into a system developed largely by a researcher named Tomas Mikolov. Called Word2Vec, the system determines how different words on the web are related, and Google is now using this as a means of strengthening its “knowledge graph”
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.
