A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a sick plant. She wants to look it up online but does not speak English. The nonprofit Current AI believes she should not have to learn English to access information.
Current AI is working to solve that problem by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, the nonprofit teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division. The result was Suno Sutra, which means "listening chronicles" in Hindi. It is a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without needing an internet connection.
"In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them," Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, allowing developer communities to build on it.
A Fast-Moving Nonprofit
Current AI was founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne. The organization has moved quickly since then. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations. Most recently, last week, it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva.
Bdeir joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, a STEM education company that reached millions of children before selling to Sphero in 2019.
Current AI operates as a "public-private partnership" that brings together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest technology, Bdeir told TechCrunch. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million. The Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce also joined, bringing total committed funding to $400 million.
"They're not investors; they're funders," Bdeir said.
The Problem with Private AI
The problem Current AI aims to solve is straightforward. Every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company.
"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."
Half the world's spoken languages face 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 said.
When asked about Big Tech's multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. "Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market," she said, "regardless of consent or context." The consequences are concrete. "For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules," she said.
Not Just About Language
Stay ahead of the AI curve
The most important updates, news, and content — delivered weekly.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
An AI's ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. "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 said.
Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web. In that system, improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data.
First Grant Cohort
Current's first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.
The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education. Lebanon's Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities, not tech companies, control. Brazil's Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. Kenya's African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.
Who Owns the Data?
On the question of data ownership, Bdeir did not mince words. "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 told TechCrunch.
The nonprofit's approach is to store models and data locally. It brings in community experts before anything is built. It writes consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.
None of Current AI's grantees have fully solved the data ownership question yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. "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."
As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says scale is not the only measure. "That is the Big Tech paradigm," she said. "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."
Building the Stack
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power.
Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack. The stack is designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.