The “father of the Internet” finally retires

Vinton Cerf will leave 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 speaking in Open Border Conference Hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing the RISC processor architecture.

“Vint…has been at Google for over 20 years and is retiring in a week, so I think we should give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to applause from the room.

Google did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Cerf, 83, and his collaborator Robert Kahn are credited with being the architects of the network protocols that became the Internet we know today. His work in developing and popularizing TCP/IP (the basic set of rules that allows different computer networks to communicate with each other) starting in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a 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 is completely evangelized, for better or worse.)

Cerf spoke on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on long-lasting open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks. They offered advice on what it takes to build open source systems that survive, advice that is increasingly relevant as founders push for open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the conference discussion focused on the problems with centralizing advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open Internet that made Cerf protocols so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of artificial intelligence agents (software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software) would push technology companies to re-adopt standardized protocols.

“The agent model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability and a requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up having outsized influence on how the agency economy actually works, a dynamic similar to the early Internet protocol wars.

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

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

“Do you remember the old telephone game where you wish you had whispered in someone’s ear and then when it got 10 people away, the message was totally different? Imagine a group of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of scary.”

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

“He’s always been the best-dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he arrived as a graduate student in a shirt and tie in the ’70s.”

“It’s absolutely true,” Cerf said. “I even had a vest, and for some reason I always wanted to stand out, and instead of having long hair and something on my nose, I thought dressing differently was a way to do it.”