A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. They want to research it online but do not speak English. They should not have to. That is the problem Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is tackling: building open, public AI infrastructure available to all, for free.
At the India AI Summit in February, Current AI teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, to create Suno Sutra, Hindi for 'listening chronicles'. This pocket-sized, offline device runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet required. 'In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,' said Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI, in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open source, allowing developer communities to build upon it.
A public-private partnership model for common-interest AI
Current AI operates as a 'public-private partnership', bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. 'They are not investors; they are funders,' Bdeir said. The goal 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, there has to be a public alternative, like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free,' she added.
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AI as a guardian of endangered languages and cultures
Half of the world's spoken languages face extinction. '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 emphasized. She drew a sharp distinction with Big Tech's multilingual push: 'Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market, regardless of consent or context.' Concrete consequences include 'for Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules.' Language is more than communication: 'Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory, and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology cannot speak your language, it cannot hold your culture either.' Her vision is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data.
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First grant round: Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon
Current AI's first cohort grant round, announced last month, deployed $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. The Masakhane project in Kenya builds AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education. Lebanon's Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history into machine-readable databases controlled by communities. Brazil's Portal sem Porteiras is developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. Kenya's African Internet Rights Alliance is creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent. On data ownership, Bdeir did not mince words: 'There are different models for who owns data, but one thing is sure: it should not be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier.' The nonprofit's approach stores models and data locally, involves community experts before building anything, and writes consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.
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Alpha Chat: an open-source chatbot built by a global coalition
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI 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: language model, safety tooling, and computing power. Additionally, Current AI struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on 'Sovereign AI'. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.
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Scale is not always the measure, Bdeir argues. 'That is the Big Tech paradigm. This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.' While the world debates AI regulation, Current AI is building a concrete alternative rooted in local communities and languages. For more on the intersection of AI and culture, read China bans AI virtual companions: millions lose their emotional chatbots and Five features Gemini still lacks that keep me paying for ChatGPT. For broader context, see Wikipedia's World Wide Web entry.
