Vinton Cerf will step down as Google’s top internet evangelist next week, concluding one of the most influential careers in technology history.
While speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, a UC Berkeley professor best known for co-creating the RISC processor architecture.
“Beant has been with Google for more than 20 years and is retiring a week from today,” Patterson said. Patterson said to cheers from the room.
Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are known 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 allow various computer networks to communicate with each other starting in the 1970s, has earned him numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Turing Award.
Since 2005, Cerf has served as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say that the Internet has been completely evangelized, for better or worse.)
Cerf spoke on a panel along with other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson. François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, a Stanford computer scientist who developed the Tcl programming language and co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technology expert at Databricks. They provided advice on what it takes to build a surviving open source system. This advice has become increasingly relevant as startups invest in open infrastructure for the next generation 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, which made Cerf’s own protocol so durable. But Cerf predicted that the emergence of AI agents, software that can operate autonomously and collaborate with other software, will force technology companies to return to standardized protocols.
“The agent model of AI, where multiple agents from different sources interact with each other, will force composability, interoperability and standardization requirements,” Cerf said.
If he’s right, the companies that define these interoperability standards early could have enormous influence over how the agent economy actually works. This is a dynamic not unlike 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 needed.
“I don’t think English is going to be the best option. There’s flexibility, but there’s ambiguity. I think precision in interaction between agents will be very important. Agents need to make sure the other person understands what they’re agreeing to do together,” Cerf said.
“Remember the old game of telephone where you wanted to whisper in someone’s ear, but when you were 10 people away, your message would be completely different? Imagine multiple agents talking to each other in natural language. That’s kind of scary.”
On a more light-hearted note, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his three-piece suits, as a graduate student in the 1970s.
“He was the best-dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came as a graduate student in the 70s wearing a shirt and tie.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Cerf said. “I wore a vest and somehow wanted to stand out, and I thought one way to do this would be to dress differently rather than have long hair and something hanging over your nose.”
If you purchase through links in our articles, we may receive a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
