The “Father of the Internet” is finally retiring

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

While talking via video streaming on Open Frontier 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 he’s retiring a week from today, so I think we should give him a round of applause for a pretty good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

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

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

Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, it’s safe to say that the Internet is fully evangelized, for better or worse.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel with other computer scientists known for their work on resilient 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 founded Electric Cloud. and Matei Zaharia, who is co-founder and chief technologist at Databricks. They offered advice on what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that is increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the conference discussion focused on the problems with concentrating advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, as opposed to the decentralized world of the open internet that made Cerf’s protocols so resilient. But Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents — software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software — would push tech companies back toward standardized protocols.

“The agent model of artificial intelligence, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, will enforce composability and the requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, the companies that define these interoperability standards early could end up having a lot of influence over how the agency economy actually works—a dynamic not unlike the Internet’s early protocol wars.

While other participants assumed 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 choice. There’s a flexibility to it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think the accuracy of the 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’ve just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wished you had whispered in someone’s ear and then when it got 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 scary.”

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

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

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