Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
TechCrunch Kate Park
Nonprofit Current AI just shipped an offline AI device for 22 Indian languages and an open-source chatbot in Geneva. It's building a free, public alternative to Big Tech's AI models.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Kate Park — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Current AI has only existed since February 2025, but it isn't wasting time. The nonprofit, founded by Martin Tisne, teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, to launch Suno Sutra at the India AI Summit that same month. The name means "listening chronicles" in Hindi, and the device itself is a small, offline gadget that runs AI across 22 Indian languages without needing a connection. It's open-sourced, so developer communities can build on top of it — a deliberate choice given how many of India's languages and dialects, CEO Ayah Bdeir says, simply aren't represented in mainstream AI today.
Bdeir joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy, and before that she founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before its 2019 sale to Sphero. Her framing for Current AI is blunt: every major AI system, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, is privately owned, and if AI is going to reshape everyone's life, there needs to be a public option too — something she compares to the World Wide Web, free and open to anyone.
The money behind this isn't small. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, and the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce joined in, pushing total committed funding to $400 million. Bdeir is careful to draw a line here — these are funders, not investors, operating what she calls a public-private partnership rather than a venture bet.
Last month, Current AI handed out $3.2 million in grants across four organizations. Masakhane in Kenya is building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education. Lebanon's Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history into databases that communities, not tech companies, control. Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities so data stays within the territory. And Kenya's African Internet Rights Alliance is developing tools to audit AI systems for accountability across the continent. Bdeir argues scale isn't the right yardstick for any of this — an Indigenous elder in the Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to pass down ecological knowledge counts as success in her book, even if it never shows up in a usage chart.
Last week in Geneva, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot put together in just seven weeks by ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, each contributing a different piece of the stack — a language model here, safety tooling there, compute somewhere else. Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo startup working on what it calls Sovereign AI, to build a shared open-source stack meant to support Japanese language and culture alongside communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have mostly overlooked.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Big Tech keeps selling multilingual AI as inclusion when it's really just market expansion, and nobody's asking Indigenous communities for consent before their language ends up as training data. Current AI's approach — small grants, local control, no scale obsession — won't produce a flashy leaderboard number, but it's aimed at a real gap that Silicon Valley has no financial incentive to fill. A $400 million public alternative to OpenAI and Google isn't going to topple anyone, but it's the kind of infrastructure that should have existed years ago.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch