A nonprofit organization founded just months ago is betting that artificial intelligence can be built differently — not by a handful of private companies in Silicon Valley, but as a public resource open to anyone, in any language.
Current AI, launched in February 2025 by Martin Tisné, has already seeded $100 million from the French government and secured $400 million in total committed funding from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce. The organization operates as a public-private partnership, and its CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January 2025 after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, says the goal is nothing less than creating an open, public alternative to the dominant AI systems.
“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 said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
Building AI for Languages That AI Ignores
The urgency behind Current AI’s mission stems from a stark reality: half the world’s spoken languages face extinction, and every major AI system — from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic — belongs to a private company. English drives the largest language models, leaving vast swaths of humanity unrepresented.
“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Bdeir said. “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.”
Current AI has already moved from mission to product. Last week at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, the organization launched AlphaChat, an open source AI chatbot built in just 7 weeks by 10 organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab.
In February 2025, at the India AI Summit, Current AI teamed with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, to create Suno Sutra — a pocket-sized offline AI device that runs in 22 Indian languages with no internet required. The device has been open sourced.
The organization also struck a deal with Tokyo-based startup Sakana AI to build a shared open source AI stack for the Japanese language and the Global South.
Data Ownership as the Central Unresolved Question
Current AI’s approach directly challenges how Big Tech collects and uses data, especially from marginalized communities.
“Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” Bdeir said. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules.”
The organization stores models and data locally, brings in community experts before building anything, and writes consent protocols that allow communities to halt the process. But Bdeir acknowledges that none of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved data ownership yet.
Stay ahead of the AI curve
The most important updates, news, and content — delivered weekly.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
“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 said.
First Grant Cohort Targets Four Continents
Last month, Current AI allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations spanning Africa, the Middle East and South America. The grants went to projects in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.
Masakhane, based in Kenya, is building AI datasets across 50+ African languages for applications in health, farming and education. The Institute for Worldmaking in Lebanon is digitizing Arab cultural history into community-controlled databases. Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, with the condition that data stays in territory. The African Internet Rights Alliance, also in Kenya, is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across Africa.
Bdeir praised the grantees for embedding data governance into their work from the start. “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.”
Redefining Success Beyond Scale
Bdeir, who previously founded the STEM education company littleBits and sold it to Sphero in 2019, brings a background in making complex technology accessible to millions of kids. But she warns against measuring AI success purely by user numbers.
“Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said.
Instead, Current AI envisions a world where AI serves specific, local needs. “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,” Bdeir said.
“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.”
The funders backing Current AI — including the French government with $100 million, plus the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce for a total of $400 million — are not investors seeking returns. They are funders supporting a public good.
With $3.2 million already deployed and projects spanning from a pocket-sized device in 22 Indian languages to AI datasets across 50+ African languages, Current AI is racing to prove that an open, community-controlled alternative to Big Tech’s AI is not just possible — it is already underway.