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. 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. Last month, it allocated $3.2 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. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”

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. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.

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.

Current’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.

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 thousand people wealthier,” she told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.

None of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.”

As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.”

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, 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 build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.

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Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital.

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