Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
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- Current AI was founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne with a $100 million seed from the French government, later joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce to reach $400 million in committed funding.
- Ayah Bdeir joined as CEO in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy and previously founding littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019.
- Suno Sutra, an offline device running AI in 22 Indian languages, emerged from a partnership with India's Bhashini at the India AI Summit, addressing the fact that "hundreds of different languages and dialects" are not represented by current AI systems.
- Current AI allocated $3.2 million in its first grant round to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon, covering African language datasets, Arab cultural digitization, and Indigenous-controlled data tools.
- Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot launched at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, was assembled in seven weeks by ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab.
- Current AI struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese language and Global South communities that dominant AI systems "have largely ignored."
- Bdeir drew a sharp distinction from Big Tech's multilingual work, arguing it exists "to expand their market, regardless of consent or context" — citing missionary Bible translations becoming training data for Indigenous languages "before communities have set any rules."
Why it matters: Current AI is explicitly testing whether a publicly-funded alternative can serve the half of the world's spoken languages facing extinction, with consent protocols and community-controlled data as core principles. But $3.2 million spread across four grantees in three continents — against the $400 million committed overall — illustrates the scale gap Bdeir herself acknowledges when she says "scale is not always the measure."
