A farmer in rural India snaps a photo of a wilting crop. She wants to look it up online, but she doesn't speak English—and she shouldn't have to. That's the kind of challenge a nonprofit called Current AI is tackling by building open, public AI infrastructure. At the India AI Summit in February, it partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, to create Suno Sutra—Hindi for "listening chronicles." This pocket-sized, offline device runs AI in 22 Indian languages without needing an internet connection. It's open-source, allowing developer communities to build upon it.

Founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, the nonprofit is moving quickly. Last month, it distributed $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations. Most recently, at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, it launched an open-source AI chatbot. Bdeir, who joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy, previously founded littleBits, a STEM education company that reached millions of kids before being sold to Sphero in 2019. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, with additional support from 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 core problem is straightforward: every major AI system today—from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic—is owned by 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 are at risk of 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 explained. When asked about Big Tech's multilingual efforts, she drew a sharp distinction. "Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market," she said, "regardless of consent or context." The consequences are tangible. "For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules," she noted.

Language is just one piece of the puzzle. "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 retain control over their own data.

Current AI's first cohort grant round, announced last month, deployed $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. In Masakhane, Kenya, the project builds 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 developing offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya's African Internet Rights Alliance is creating audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

On data ownership, Bdeir didn't mince words. The nonprofit's approach is to store models and data locally, involve community experts before building anything, and embed consent protocols so communities can halt the process at any point. None of Current AI's grantees have fully solved this 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 can be achieved 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 envisions success as "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 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. Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on "Sovereign AI." The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack—one designed to support Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.