Imagine a farmer in rural India, holding her phone to capture an image of a wilting plant. She seeks to understand its ailment online, but the internet's dominant language, English, is not hers. She shouldn't be forced to learn it to access vital information.
This challenge is precisely what Current AI, a non-profit organization dedicated to building open, public AI infrastructure, aims to overcome. In February, at the India AI Summit, Current AI forged a partnership with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division. This collaboration led to Suno Sutra, meaning "listening chronicles" in Hindi – a compact, offline device capable of running AI in 22 Indian languages, entirely without internet access. "In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them," Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir stated in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, empowering developer communities to build upon its foundation.
Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the nonprofit is demonstrating rapid progress. Last month, it distributed $3.2 million in grants to projects spanning four organizations. More recently, just last week, it unveiled an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva.
Ayah Bdeir joined Current AI in January, bringing with her extensive experience from leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. Prior to that, she founded littleBits, a STEM education company that engaged millions of children before its acquisition by Sphero in 2019.
Current AI operates as a "public-private partnership," uniting governments, corporations, and philanthropic entities to fund public interest technology, Bdeir explained to TechCrunch. The French government initiated funding with $100 million, a sum augmented by contributions from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing the total committed funding to $400 million. "They’re not investors; they’re funders," Bdeir clarified.
The fundamental problem Current AI addresses is clear: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, is controlled by a private corporation. "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," Bdeir asserted. "Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free."
Alarmingly, half of the world’s spoken languages are currently facing extinction. "And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind," Bdeir remarked.
When questioned about Big Tech's efforts in multilingual AI, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. "Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market," she explained, "regardless of consent or context." The ramifications of this approach are tangible. "For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules," she noted.
An AI's capacity to simply "speak" a language is only one facet of true understanding. "Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either," she emphasized.
Bdeir envisions Current AI as an open system, reminiscent of the early internet, where advancements benefit everyone, access remains universal, and communities retain sovereignty over their own data.
Current AI's inaugural cohort grant round, announced last month, saw the deployment of $3.2 million to four organizations situated across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.
These projects include Masakhane in Kenya, which is dedicated to building AI datasets for over 50 African languages across health, farming, and education sectors. Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practices into machine-readable databases that are controlled by communities, not tech companies. In Brazil, Portal sem Porteiras is developing offline AI tools in collaboration with Indigenous Amazon communities, ensuring data remains within their territories. Furthermore, Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is crafting audit tools to uphold accountability for AI systems throughout the continent.
Regarding the critical issue of data ownership, Bdeir was unequivocal. "There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier," she conveyed to TechCrunch.
The nonprofit’s methodology involves storing models and data locally, actively engaging community experts before any development begins, and integrating consent protocols into the pipeline, empowering communities to halt the process at any juncture.
While none of Current AI’s grantees have yet achieved a complete solution, Bdeir views this as central to their mission. "Every one of them has built the question into their work," she said, "rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone."
Addressing questions about the impact achievable with a $3.2 million budget distributed among four organizations, Bdeir countered, "Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm." She offered a compelling vision: "This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language."
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot collaboratively assembled in just seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor provided a crucial component of the technological stack, from language models to safety tooling and computing power.
Current AI has also forged a partnership with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup recognized for its work on "Sovereign AI." The two entities plan to construct a shared open-source AI stack, designed not only to support the Japanese language and culture but also to serve communities across the Global South that have largely been overlooked by dominant AI systems.
The Editorial Staff at AIChief is a team of professional content writers with extensive experience in AI and marketing. Founded in 2025, AIChief has quickly grown into the largest free AI resource hub in the industry.