AI & Models
Current AI races to build a free, open web of AI
Current AI, a nonprofit that has raised $400 million from governments, foundations, and companies, is building open AI infrastructure meant to work for languages Big Tech ignores.
Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the nonprofit describes its mission as building a public alternative to the private AI systems run by companies including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, and the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce joined as funders, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. Bdeir, who joined the nonprofit in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy and previously founded the STEM company littleBits (sold to Sphero in 2019), calls these organizations “funders,” not investors.
One product of that funding is Suno Sutra, an open-source, pocket-sized offline device built with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, and unveiled in February at the India AI Summit. It runs AI in 22 Indian languages without an internet connection, targeting users such as a farmer in rural India who wants to research a dying plant but doesn’t speak English.
Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction, and English’s dominance in large language models leaves most of the world’s languages — and the cultures and communities they carry — behind, Bdeir said. She drew a contrast with Big Tech’s approach, which she said builds multilingual models to expand market reach without regard to communities’ consent or context, citing cases where missionary Bible translations of Indigenous languages became AI training data before communities set any rules of their own.
Last month, Current AI allocated $3.2 million in grants across four organizations: Masakhane in Kenya is building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history into community-controlled databases; Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within their territory; and Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing tools to audit AI systems.
Earlier this month, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, unveiled at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The nonprofit also struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting the Japanese language and communities across the Global South.
Why it matters
As half the world’s languages face extinction, Current AI’s bet is that AI infrastructure shaped by and for underserved communities — not scaled for maximum market reach — could preserve knowledge Big Tech’s multilingual push would otherwise leave behind.