Vinton Cerf, known widely as the “Father of the Internet,” is retiring from Google after more than 20 years in the role of chief internet evangelist.
The announcement was made at the Open Frontier conference, hosted by the Laude Institute. Dave Patterson, a UC Berkeley professor known for co-developing the RISC processor architecture, informed the audience of Cerf’s departure while introducing him for a panel discussion. Patterson said, “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.” The remark was met with applause from those in attendance.
Cerf joined Google in 2005 as vice president and chief internet evangelist.
In the 1970s, Cerf worked with fellow computer scientist Robert Kahn to develop the TCP/IP protocols, which established the technical rules that allow separate computer networks to exchange information. These protocols remain in use today and form the basis of how the internet functions.
For this work, Cerf received the ACM Turing Award in 2004, an honor often compared to the Nobel Prize in computing. In 2005, then-US President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
During the same panel, Cerf discussed the growing use of AI agents and how they communicate with one another. He said natural language may not be suitable for this purpose, stating, “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.”
To illustrate his point, Cerf referred to the game commonly known as “Chinese whispers,” where a message becomes distorted as it passes from person to person.
He 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?”
He added, “Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”
He is 83 years old.
