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.
Current AI, 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.
The nonprofit operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech. 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.
“Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free,” said Ayah Bdeir, Current AI CEO in an interview with TechCrunch. “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 drew a sharp distinction between Big Tech’s multilingual push and Current AI’s mission. “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.
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. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next,” she said. “So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either.”
Current’s first cohort grant round 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.
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.”
Source: Original article