The father of the internet says its biggest lessons are about to become AI's 3 biggest challenges

Vinton Cerf, the father of the internet, said that AI reminds him of the early days of the internet.

Noam Galai/Getty Images for Webby Awards

As AI races toward an agent-powered future, a legendary systems engineer says it reminds him of another technological revolution he knows quite well: the birth of the internet.Vinton Cerf, the now 83-year-old who helped invent the networking protocols that underpin the modern web, has important guidance for the AI boom.During a panel this week with computer scientists and Databricks cofounder Matei Zaharia at the Open Frontiers conference, Cerf highlighted several principles that could help determine whether AI reaches its full potential.Open standards matter more than closed systemsCerf said the internet only became ubiquitous because no single company owned it, and everyone could use it."In the case of internet, it only worked because it was going to be distributed to begin with," said Cerf. "And so we left the rules very open. We just said if you can find somebody to connect to and you follow the rules of the protocols, it should work."Having common protocols meant that a university network in California, a government research lab, and a commercial internet service provider could all connect using the same technical language.Cerf said AI is approaching the same inflection point at which the number of AI agents would demand "interoperability and standardization."