Google chief internet evangelist Vinton Cerf will step down next week, closing one of technology’s most influential careers.
Cerf announced the move while speaking by video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute.
UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson, best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture, recognised Cerf during the event.
“Vint … has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that Cerf will be stepping down from his role at the company.
Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as the architects of the networking protocols that underlie the internet we are stuck with today. His work developing and popularising TCP/IP began in the 1970s.
Cerf’s work has been recognised with honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Turing Award, among other shiny trinkets.
Since 2005, Cerf has served as Google’s vice president and chief internet evangelist. At this point, it seems safe to say the internet has been fully evangelised.
Cerf appeared on a panel with other computer scientists known for durable open source projects.
They included Patterson, Keras deep-learning library creator and Ndea co-founder François Chollet, Stanford computer scientist John Ousterhout and Databricks co-founder and chief technologist Matei Zaharia.
Ousterhout created the Tcl programming language and co-founded Electric Cloud.
The panel offered advice on building open-source systems that survive, which matters as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next AI wave.
Much of the conference focused on the centralisation of advanced models in a few well-funded labs. That sits awkwardly beside the decentralised open internet that made Cerf’s protocols so durable.
Cerf predicted the rise of AI agents, software that can act autonomously and co-ordinate with other software, will push tech companies towards standard protocols.
“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability and a requirement for interoperability and standardisation,” Cerf said.
If Cerf is right, the companies defining those standards early could gain outsized power over how the agentic economy works.
That would look rather like the early Internet protocol wars. Other panellists suggested natural language chat between LLM agents might be enough.
Cerf said formal standards would still be needed.
“I don’t think English is going to be the best choice. There’s a flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important. An agent really needs to be sure the other agent understands what it is that they just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.
“Remember the old telephone game where you wish you’d whispered in somebody’s ear and then by the time it got to 10 people away the message was totally different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language; you know, that’s kind of terrifying,” he said.
