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

A farmer in rural India takes a picture of a dying plant. He wants to research it online but he doesn’t know English. You shouldn’t.

That’s the kind of problem a nonprofit organization called Current AI is trying to solve by building an open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it met Bhashini, part of the Indian government’s AI language. The result was Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening texts,” a pocket-sized, offline device powered by AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of languages ​​and dialects, and currently AI is not independent,” said current AI chief Ayah Bdeir in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open source, available for developer communities to build on.

The non-profit organization, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated 3.2 million rands to projects in four organizations; recently (last week) presented 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, a STEM education company that reached millions of children before selling to Sphero in 2019.

Current AI works as a “public-private partnership” that brings together governments, corporations, and charities to fund technology in the public interest, he told TechCrunch. The French government has awarded Current AI $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce – bringing the total funding commitment to $400 million. “They are not investors; they are sponsors,” Bdeir said.

The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI program today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, is owned by a private company. “If AI is a truly transformative technology, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be some social exception,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, it’s available to anyone, free of charge.”

Half of the world’s spoken languages ​​are facing extinction. “And as English moves through major language forms and AI systems, many of the world’s languages ​​and, as a result, cultures and societies are left behind,” Bdeir said.

When asked about Big Tech’s push for multilingualism, Bdeir made a sharp distinction. “Big tech is building multilingual models to expand their market,” he said, “regardless of the license or context.” The results are concrete. “In Indigenous languages, the translation of the Bible by missionaries becomes training data before communities set laws,” he said.

Not just in language

An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is the means by which knowledge, culture, memory and identity are transmitted from one generation to another.

His vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the first web, where development benefits everyone, no one is locked out, and communities retain control over their data.

The current group’s first round, announced last month, involved sending $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon and Brazil’s Amazon.

The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves the creation of AI datasets in more than 50 African languages ​​in health, agriculture, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and modernization into a machine-readable database controlled by communities (not tech companies). Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with native Amazon communities, storing data locally. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing research tools to make AI systems accountable across the country.

Who owns the data?

On the question of data ownership, Bdeir did not speak. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in different communities, but one thing is certain: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a few thousand people rich,” he told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach is to keep models and data in place, bring in community experts before anything is built, or write consent agreements in the pipeline so communities can stop the process at any time.

None of the Current AI providers have fully resolved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as a point. “They all put the question into their work,” he said, “rather than accepting the common mistake, where difficulty becomes an excuse to let the government or a tech company decide for everyone.”

As for how much progress can be made by dividing the $3.2 million budget into four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always a measure. That’s the paradigm of Big Tech,” he said. This might look like a Native elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool developed in Kenya to be able to convey natural knowledge in his own language.”

Building a stack

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open source chatbot put together in seven weeks by a consortium of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and the MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including the 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 create a shared open source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that all prominent AI systems ignore.