Nonprofit Current AI pushes to build a 'World Wide Web' for public AI infrastructure

A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to.

That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on.

Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the nonprofit is moving fast. Led by CEO Ayah Bdeir (former Mozilla AI strategy lead and littleBits founder), Current AI operates as a public-private partnership. The French government seeded it with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.

“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. Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free,” Bdeir said. Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction, and with English dominating AI training data, Bdeir argues that “a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind.”

Big Tech builds multilingual models to expand markets, often without community consent. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.

Current AI’s first grant round, announced last month, allocated $3.2 million to four organizations:

• Masakhane (Kenya): Building AI datasets across 50+ African languages for health, farming, and education.
• Institute for Worldmaking (Lebanon): Digitizing Arab cultural history into community-controlled databases.
• Portal sem Porteiras (Brazil): Offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory.
• African Internet Rights Alliance (Kenya): Developing audit tools for AI accountability.

“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,” Bdeir said.

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. It also struck a deal with Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack for Japanese and Global South communities.

Bdeir sees scale differently: “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.”