Current AI wants an open web for AI

A nonprofit founded in February 2025 is trying to build a public alternative to privately controlled AI systems—one that works across languages, regions, and communities that major technology companies often overlook.

Current AI began pursuing that goal with Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device developed with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. Announced at the India AI Summit in February, the device runs AI in 22 Indian languages without an internet connection. It is open-sourced so developer communities can extend it.

“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them.”

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

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Current AI’s public-interest funding model

Current AI operates as a public-private partnership involving governments, companies, and philanthropies. The French government seeded the nonprofit with $100 million, while the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce helped bring total committed funding to $400 million.

“They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir told TechCrunch.

The organization allocated $3.2 million in grants last month to four organizations working across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon:

• Masakhane, Kenya: Building AI datasets in more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education.
• Institute for Worldmaking, Lebanon: Digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases controlled by communities rather than technology companies.
• Portal sem Porteiras, Brazil: Developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities while keeping data within the territory.
• African Internet Rights Alliance, Kenya: Creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

Current AI argues that language support is inseparable from cultural preservation. Bdeir said half of the world’s spoken languages face extinction, while English dominates the largest language models. She also criticized Big Tech’s multilingual efforts, saying they are primarily designed to expand markets “regardless of consent or context.”

“Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either.”

Open-source models and community control

Current AI’s proposed alternative includes local data and model storage, consultation with community experts before development begins, and consent protocols that allow communities to stop a project at any point. None of the nonprofit’s grantees has fully resolved data ownership, but Bdeir said each has made that question central to its work.

She rejects the idea that scale is the only meaningful measure of progress. One potential outcome, she said, would be an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of 10 organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Contributors supplied components ranging from a language model and safety tooling to computing power.

Current AI also partnered with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese language and culture, as well as communities across the Global South that dominant systems have largely ignored.