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

What happened

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 have to. That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division.

An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “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,” she said.

Her vision for Current AI 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. 2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.

Why it matters

The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on.

The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. 2 million in grants to projects across 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. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019.

Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. 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’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.

The problem it aims to solve 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, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. ” Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction.

“And 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 said. When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. ” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.

What to watch

The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon 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. On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn’t mince words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thous