The “Father of the Internet” is finally retiring

Vinton Cerf will step down from his position as Google’s chief Internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in the history of technology.

While talking in Open Borders Conference Cerf, hosted by the Laude Institute, was honored by Dave Patterson, a UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing the RISC processor architecture.

“Vint has been at Google for over 20 years, and he’s retiring a week from today, so I think we should give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said to cheers from the audience.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Cerf, 83, and his collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as the architects of the networking protocols that became the Internet we know today. His work in developing and popularizing the TCP/IP protocol—the basic set of rules that allow different computer networks to talk to each other—beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Turing Awardamong other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say that the Internet has been completely evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on enduring open source projects, including Patterson; François Cholet, founder of the Keras deep learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Oosterhout, the computer scientist at Stanford University who created the Tcl programming language and who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Mati Zaharia, Databricks co-founder and chief technology officer. They offered advice on what it takes to build viable open source systems — advice that is increasingly important as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Most of the conference discussions focused on problems with centralizing advanced models in a few well-resourced laboratories, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open Internet that has made proprietary SURF protocols so robust. However, Cerf predicted that the emergence of AI agents — programs that can act autonomously and coordinate with other programs — would push tech companies back toward standardized protocols.

“The agent model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, will force composability, requiring interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, companies that define these interoperability standards early could end up having a major impact on how the proxy economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early IP wars.

While other panelists predicted that natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted that formal standards would be required.

“I don’t think English would be the best choice. There’s flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision in the interaction between agents is going to be very important. The agent really needs to make sure that the other agent understands what they’ve just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old phone game where you hoped you could whisper in someone’s ear, and then by the time the message got out to 10 people, the message was completely different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”

In a lighter moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his three-piece wardrobe, when he was a graduate student in the 1970s.

“He was always the best computer scientist I ever met,” Patterson said. “My memories of Vint are of him coming in as a graduate student wearing a shirt and tie in the 1970s.”

“That’s absolutely true,” Cerf said. “I was even wearing a jacket, and for some reason I always wanted to stand out, and instead of having long hair and something up my nose, I thought just dressing differently was one way to do it.”