Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all

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 do that.

That’s the kind of problem a nonprofit mentions Current AI is trying to solve by building an open, public AI infrastructure. In February, at the India AI Summit, it collaborated with Bhashinithe Indian government’s AI language department. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” an offline, pocket-sized device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, with no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages ​​and dialects, and right now AI doesn’t represent them,” current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open source and available for developer communities to build on.

The non-profit organization, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is developing rapidly. Last month, it awarded $3.2 million in grants to projects from four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot on the AI for Good Summit in Geneva.

Bdeir joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of children before selling to Sphero in 2019.

Today’s AI operates as a “public-private partnership” that brings together governments, companies and philanthropies to fund public interest technology, she told TechCrunch. The French government has provided Current AI with $100 million, along with the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce, bringing its total committed funding to $400 million. “They are not investors; they are financiers,” Bdeir said.

The problem it aims to solve is simple: Every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, is owned by a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it is going to change every aspect of everyone’s lives, there must be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Just like the World Wide Web, available to everyone for free.”

Half of the world’s spoken languages ​​are experiencing problems extinction. “And with English powering the largest language models and AI systems, a large portion of the world’s languages ​​are being left behind, and with them the cultures and communities,” says Bdeir.

When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual approach, Bdeir made a sharp distinction. “Big tech is building multilingual models to expand their markets,” she said, “regardless of permission or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For indigenous languages, Bible translations from missionaries become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.

Not just about language

An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is the way knowledge, tradition, memory and identity are passed from one generation to the next. So if a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture,” she said.

Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled after the early Web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one is left out, and communities remain in control of their own data.

Current’s first round of cohort grants, announced last month, included the commitment of $3.2 million to four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.

The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets in more than 50 African languages ​​for healthcare, agriculture and education; The Lebanon Institute for Worldmaking digitizes Arab cultural history and contemporary practices into machine-readable databases run by communities (not technology companies). Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras builds offline AI tools with indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within its territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

Who owns the data?

Bdeir did not mince words on the issue of data ownership. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in different communities, but one thing is certain: it cannot be a Silicon Valley company trying to make a select few thousands of people richer,” she told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bring in community experts before anything is built, or write consent protocols into the pipeline so that communities can stop the process at any time.

None of Current AI’s grantees have fully resolved the problem yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Each of them has built demand 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 spread across four organizations, Bdeir said: “Scale is not always the benchmark. That’s the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could be akin to an indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a Kenyan-built tool to pass on ecological knowledge in their own language.”

Building the stack

Current was launched in Geneva earlier this month Alpha ChatAn open source chatbot brought together 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, security tools, and computing power.

Current AI too made a deal with Sakana AIa 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, one designed to support Japanese language and culture, as well as communities in the global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.