Picture a farmer in rural India photographing a wilting crop, hoping to find out what’s wrong with it. She doesn’t speak English, so most AI tools are useless to her. That single scenario captures exactly the gap a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to close.
Current AI is racing to build what its CEO calls the “World Wide Web of AI” — open, public AI infrastructure that anyone can use, for free, in their own language. In an industry dominated by a handful of private companies, that’s a strikingly different vision. Here’s what Current AI is building, who’s funding it, and why it could reshape who actually benefits from artificial intelligence.
What Is Current AI?
Current AI is a nonprofit founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne. It operates as a public-private partnership, pooling money from governments, companies, and philanthropic foundations to fund public-interest AI infrastructure rather than commercial products.
The organization is led by CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined in January after heading Mozilla’s AI strategy. Before that, she founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of children before being acquired by Sphero in 2019.
Current AI’s funding base is substantial. The French government seeded the initiative with $100 million, and it has since been joined by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, pushing total committed funding to $400 million.
The Problem Current AI Is Trying to Solve
The pitch is simple: every major AI system today — from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic — is owned by a private company. Bdeir argues that a technology poised to reshape daily life needs a public alternative, “like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
That mission centers heavily on language. Roughly half the world’s spoken languages are at risk of disappearing, and because English dominates the training data behind most large language models, huge swaths of the world’s languages, cultures, and communities get left out of the AI boom.
Bdeir draws a clear line between Current AI’s approach and Big Tech’s multilingual efforts. Commercial models expand into new languages mainly to grow market share, often without meaningful consent from the communities whose language and data are being used. She points to cases where missionary Bible translations became AI training data before communities had any say in the matter.
More Than Translation: Protecting Culture and Data
For Current AI, language isn’t just about words — it’s the vehicle for culture, memory, and tradition. If a system can’t speak a community’s language, it can’t hold that community’s knowledge either.
That philosophy shapes how the nonprofit builds. Rather than scraping data and shipping a product, Current AI’s model is to:
- Store models and data locally, within the community they serve
- Bring in community experts before development starts
- Build consent protocols directly into the pipeline, so communities can pause or stop a project at any point
On the sensitive question of data ownership, Bdeir has been direct: whatever the answer looks like, it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley enriching a small group of people.
Real Projects, Real Communities
Current AI isn’t just publishing position papers — it’s funding work on the ground. Its first grant round put $3.2 million into four organizations:
- Masakhane (Kenya) — building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education
- Institute for Worldmaking (Lebanon) — digitizing Arab cultural history into machine-readable databases that communities, not tech companies, control
- Portal sem Porteiras (Brazil) — developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within their territory
- African Internet Rights Alliance (Kenya) — building audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent
In February, at the India AI Summit, Current AI partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, to launch Suno Sutra (“listening chronicles” in Hindi) — a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without needing an internet connection. The device is open-source, so developer communities can build on it directly.
Building the Open AI Stack
Beyond individual grants, Current AI is assembling shared infrastructure. Earlier this month, it launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in just seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, each contributing a piece of the stack — a language model, safety tooling, or computing power.
Current AI has also partnered with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup focused on what it calls “Sovereign AI.” Together, the two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting the Japanese language and culture, along with communities across the Global South that mainstream AI systems have largely overlooked.
Why Scale Isn’t the Point
With $400 million committed but only $3.2 million deployed so far across four organizations, some might question how much impact Current AI can realistically have. Bdeir pushes back on that framing directly: “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm.”
Instead, she measures success in terms of connection and access — her example being an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.
The Bigger Picture
Current AI’s approach lands at a moment when AI infrastructure and governance are drawing global attention — from international cooperation efforts discussed at AI conferences to renewed calls from industry leaders for oversight of advanced AI systems. Whether a public, nonprofit alternative can meaningfully compete with the scale of private AI labs remains an open question. But Current AI is betting that “free and open for everyone” is a value worth building toward, even if progress starts small, one language and one community at a time.
Frequently Referenced Facts
- Founded: February 2025, by Martin Tisne
- CEO: Ayah Bdeir (joined January 2026)
- Total committed funding: $400 million
- Key funders: French government, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, Salesforce
- First grant round: $3.2 million across four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon, and Brazil
AI
