Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief Internet evangelist next week, ending one of the most influential careers in technology history.
Speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier Conference hosted by the Loud Institute, Cerf was recognised by UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson, who is known for co-developing the RISC processor architecture.
Patterson said, “Vint…has been at Google for more than 20 years, and he’s retiring a week from today, and so I think we should applaud him for a relatively good career.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Cerf, 83, and colleague Robert Kahn are credited as the architects of the networking protocols that became the Internet we know today. His work to develop and popularise TCP/IP – the basic set of rules that let different computer networks talk to each other – began in the 1970s and has been recognised with several honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Turing Award, among other honours. a Turing Award and other honours.
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 hyped up, whether good or bad.)
Cerf was speaking on a panel with other computer scientists known for their work on sustainable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of NDA; John Osterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technologist at Databricks. He offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that is increasingly relevant as founders are betting on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.
Much of the conference discussion focused on the problems of centralising advanced models in a few well-equipped laboratories, in contrast to the decentralised world of the open Internet that made Cerf’s own protocol so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents – software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software – would push tech companies back toward standardised protocols.
“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force the need for composability and interoperability and standardisation,” Cerf said.
If he’s right, the companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up with a big impact on how the agentic economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early Internet protocol wars.
While other panellists anticipated that natural language communication between LLM agents would suffice, Cerf predicted that they would need formal standards.
“I don’t think English would be the best choice. There’s flexibility, but there’s ambiguity, and I think accuracy will be very, very important for interagent interactions. An agent really needs to make sure that the other agent understands what it is that they’ve agreed to do together,” Cerf said.
“Remember the old telephone game where you wanted to whisper in someone’s ear and then when it got to 10 people the message was entirely different? Imagine a number of agents talking to each other in natural language; you know, it’s pretty scary.”
In a more light-hearted moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, who was known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a graduate student in the 1970s.
“He’s always been one of the best-dressed computer scientists I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came in as a graduate student in the ’70s with a shirt and tie.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Cerf said. “I wore a vest to express my individuality instead of having long hair or piercings.”
