“Internet Dad” is finally giving up

Vinton Cerf will step down as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the end of one of the most influential careers in tech history.

While speaking at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, a UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing the RISC processor architecture.

“Vint…he’s been at Google for over 20 years, and he’s retiring a week from today, so I think we should applaud him for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, cheering the room.

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

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as the creators of the communication protocols that evolved into the Internet we know today. His work developing and expanding TCP/IP – the basic set of rules that allow different computer networks to communicate – since the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Turing Award, among other awards.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. (For now, we can safely say that the Internet is fully evangelized, for better or for worse.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel featuring other computer scientists known for their work on long-running open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras library and founder of Ndea; John Outsterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief engineer of Databricks. They offered advice on what it takes to build heavy-duty open-source systems — advice that’s becoming more and more effective as innovators bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the discussion at the conference focused on the problems of centralizing advanced models in a few well-equipped labs, in contrast to the fragmented world of the open Internet that made the Cerf agreements last so long. However, Cerf predicted that the proliferation of AI agents — software that can operate independently and interface with other software — will bring tech companies back to conventional agreements.

“The AI ​​model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources communicating, will force compatibility, and the requirement for collaboration and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, companies defining those interoperability standards early on could end up having more influence on how the agent economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early Internet wars.

While some panelists thought natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted formal standards would be needed.

“I don’t think that English will be the best choice. There is flexibility in it, but there is ambiguity, and I think that the accuracy of the interagent interaction will be very, very important. The agent really needs to be sure that the other agent understands what it is that they have just agreed to do together,” said Cerf.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wanted to whisper in someone’s ear and when it reached 10 people the message was completely different?

In a moment of lightheartedness, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a grad 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 came in as a grad student with 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 go out, and instead of having long hair, and something on my nose, I thought dressing differently was another way to do it.”