Father of the internet Vint Cerf is retiring from Google

Vint Cerf, widely credited as the father of the internet, will step down next week from his role as Google's chief internet evangelist, ending a run of more than 20 years at the company.

The news broke not through a Google statement but during a panel at the Open Frontier conference, hosted by the Laude Institute. Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor who co-designed Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processor architecture, noted that Cerf, who had been with Google since 2005, was retiring “a week from today".

But 83-year-old Cerf is more famous for the development of the TCP/IP protocol along with Robert Kahn back in the 70s.

For which he has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computing, among others over the past half-century.

Some of Cerf’s time on the panel was devoted to the claim that, at some point, AI agents created by competing firms will have to rely upon technical protocols rather than using natural language to communicate with one another.

Cerf claimed that natural language was not precise enough for AI to use when dealing with sophisticated or important issues, much like how the game of “telephone” distorts a message every time it gets passed along.

His fellow panellists believed that agents powered by large language models could just speak in natural language; Cerf disagreed, claiming that more precise protocols would be needed.

The moderator of the panel concluded by reminiscing about how he first met Cerf as a graduate student in the 1970s, claiming he was "the best-dressed computer scientist" he had ever seen. Cerf replied with laughter, stating that he wore a shirt, tie, and vest and that he liked to dress formally in order to stand out from the crowd.