Current AI builds a public alternative to Big Tech’s AI, starting with 22 Indian languages

A nonprofit called Current AI is racing to build an open, public AI infrastructure modeled on the early World Wide Web — free for all, starting with communities whose languages and cultures have been left out of today’s dominant AI systems. Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the organization has already secured $400 million in commitments from the French government, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce.

A device for farmers who don’t speak English

In February at the India AI Summit, Current AI partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, to create Suno Sutra (Hindi for “listening chronicles”). The result is a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages — no internet required. The device is fully open-sourced, meaning developer communities anywhere can build on it.

“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir told Bitcoin World. Bdeir, who joined Current AI in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy and founding littleBits, says the problem is straightforward: every major AI system today belongs to a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, there has to be a public alternative,” she said.

$3.2 million in grants to four continents

Last month, Current AI allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. The projects include building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education (Masakhane, Kenya); digitizing Arab cultural history into community-controlled databases (Institute for Worldmaking, Lebanon); building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities (Portal sem Porteiras, Brazil); and developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across Africa (African Internet Rights Alliance, Kenya).

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

Why language and data ownership matter

Bdeir draws a sharp distinction between Current AI’s approach and Big Tech’s multilingual push. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market, regardless of consent or context,” she said. She points to a concrete example: “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules.”

The stakes go beyond language itself. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next,” Bdeir said. “So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either.” Current AI’s model stores models and data locally, brings in community experts before anything is built, and writes consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.

An open-source AI stack for the Global South

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current AI 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: a language model, safety tooling, and computing power. The nonprofit also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup focused on “Sovereign AI,” to build a shared open-source AI stack designed to support Japanese language and culture — and communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.

Conclusion

Current AI’s approach is still early — its first grant round was $3.2 million split across four organizations — but its vision is ambitious. “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” Bdeir 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.” With $400 million in committed funding and growing partnerships across governments, nonprofits, and tech companies, Current AI is positioning itself as a credible public alternative to the private AI giants.

FAQs

Q1: What is Current AI?
A: Current AI is a nonprofit founded in February 2025 that builds open, public AI infrastructure for underserved languages and communities. It operates as a public-private partnership with $400 million in commitments from governments, foundations, and tech companies.

Q2: How is Current AI different from Big Tech’s AI efforts?
A: Current AI focuses on community control, consent, and open-source development. Unlike Big Tech, which Bdeir says builds multilingual models to expand market reach, Current AI works with communities to set rules for data use and keeps models and data stored locally.

Q3: What has Current AI built so far?
A: The nonprofit has launched Suno Sutra, an offline AI device supporting 22 Indian languages; Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built with Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab; and awarded $3.2 million in grants to four organizations working on AI datasets, cultural digitization, offline tools, and audit systems across Africa, Lebanon, and Brazil.