A farmer in rural India takes a photograph of a dying plant. He wants to research it on the Internet but he doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to do it.

That’s the kind of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building an open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI languages ​​division. The result was Suno Sutra, which in Hindi means “listening to chronicles,” an offline pocket device that runs artificial intelligence in 22 Indian languages, without the need for the Internet. “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 use.

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

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

Today’s AI operates as a “public-private partnership” that brings together governments, companies and philanthropic organizations to fund technology in the public interest, he told TechCrunch. The French government contributed $100 million to Current AI, along with the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing the total funding committed 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 has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”

Half of the languages ​​spoken in the world are in danger of extinction. “And as English powers the most important language models and artificial intelligence systems, a large portion of the world’s languages ​​and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said.

When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir made a clear distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” he said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For indigenous languages, missionary translations of the Bible become training data before communities establish rules,” he said.

Not just about the language

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

Their vision for today’s AI is an open system inspired by the first web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one is excluded, and communities remain in control of their own data.

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

The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves creating AI datasets in more than 50 African languages ​​for health, agriculture and education; Lebanon’s World Creation Institute is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases controlled by communities (not tech companies). Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is creating offline artificial intelligence tools with Amazonian indigenous communities, keeping data within the territory. And 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 the data in different communities, but one thing is for sure: it shouldn’t be a Silicon Valley company trying to enrich a few thousand people,” he 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 process so communities can stop the process at any time.

None of Current AI’s beneficiaries have fully figured it out yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Each of them has incorporated the issue into their work,” he said, “rather than accepting the usual standard, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a technology company decide for everyone.”

As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget divided among four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure. That’s the Big Tech paradigm,” he said. “This could look like an indigenous elder from the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to transmit ecological knowledge in his own language.”

Building the stack

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open source chatbot created in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor contributed a part of the package, including a language model, security tools 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, designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that have been largely ignored by mainstream AI systems.