ImageNet dataset is the main thing AFAIK. But even so I find Dr. Li's contribution big enough. For a context, datasets for computer vision at her time were mostly small, so nn was rarely considered a good method for CV. Not until AlexNet won the challenge, and the world changes after that. I remember many people initially scoffed at ImageNet, arguing that the dataset was flawed and that a “bad” method like NN (AlexNet) could only win because of those flaws. Simply saying “paying” is an understatement because we also need to account for the academic politics of her time. A little fun fact, even if most research papers nowadays try to propose new dataset, if we take imagenet and pretrain the backbone, we usually end up with a very strong baseline.

Btw, not sure why you think Karpathy has a bigger impact than Fei-Fei Li. I can't think what he is doing that is actually changing the playing field.