Strikes me mainly as a trendy recasting of the statistical concept of a "sufficient statistic" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufficient_statistic)
Also, not sure mathematicians wore skinny jeans in 1904.
What does group theory tell me in the context of 1+1 that knowing the answer is 2 doesn't? Generalizations are useful because they apply to more than one context.
That said; the interesting connection between two areas of mathematics is what I took from the article, but I'd agree that his title (well, subtitle) is way overblown - his argument for "Why ML experts should care" seems to boil down to speed, but the Haskell statistics package itself contains faster algorithms that are marked unsafe, and he hasn't demonstrated safety.