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.
When speaking via videotape Open Border conference Hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson, who is 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, and I think we should give him some applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said to applause from the room.
Google did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are considered the architects of the network protocols that became the Internet as we know it today. His work beginning in the 1970s to develop and popularize TCP/IP, the basic set of rules that allow different computer networks to talk to each other, has earned him numerous honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Turing Awardamong other honors.
Since 2005, Cerf has been a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, it’s safe to say that the internet is completely evangelized, for better or for worse.)
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 Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language and co-founder of Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks. They offered advice on what it takes to build surviving open source systems—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 challenges of centralizing advanced models in a few well-resourced labs, as opposed to the decentralized world of the open internet that makes Cerf’s protocols so sustainable. However, Cerf predicted that AI agents—software that can operate autonomously and coordinate with other software—will push tech companies back toward standardized protocols.
“The agent model of AI, in which multiple agents from multiple sources interact with each other, will reinforce combinability and demand for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.
If he’s right, companies that define these interoperability standards early on could have a big impact on how the agent economy actually works—not unlike the dynamic, early internet protocol wars.
While other panelists assumed that natural language communication between LLM agents would suffice, Cerf predicted that formal standards would be required.
“I don’t think English would be the best choice. There’s flexibility, but there’s uncertainty, and I think precision is going to be very, very important for interactions between agents. An agent has to really make sure that the other agent understands what they’ve just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.
“Remember the old telephone game where you want to whisper in someone’s ear and when you get to 10 people, the message is completely different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, it’s kind of creepy.”
Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his three-piece suit wardrobe, as 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 came as a graduate in the ’70s in a shirt and tie.”
“That’s absolutely true,” said Cerf. “I even had a vest and somehow I always wanted to stand out and instead of having long hair and something on my nose, I thought dressing differently was one way to do it.”
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