The nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the AI ​​World Wide Web, free for everyone

A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to look it up on the Internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t do that.

This is the type of problem that a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building public, open AI infrastructure. At the India AI Summit in February, she collaborated with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI Languages ​​Division. The result was Sonu Sutra, a Hindi term meaning “listening logs,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs artificial intelligence in 22 Indian languages, without the need for the Internet. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages ​​and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Aya Badir, the current AI CEO, said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open source and available for developer communities to build on.

The nonprofit, founded by Martin Tesney in February 2025, is moving quickly. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; And recently (last week) it launched an open source AI chatbot at the AI ​​for Good Summit in Geneva.

Badir joined the company in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, a STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling it to Sphero in 2019.

She told TechCrunch that current AI functions as a “public-private partnership” that brings together governments, companies and philanthropies to fund public interest technology. The French government has funded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, bringing the total committed funding to $400 million. “They are not investors, but financiers,” Badir 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 is going to change every aspect of everyone’s lives, there has to be a universal alternative,” Badir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone for free.”

Half of the world’s spoken languages ​​are at risk of extinction. “With English leading the largest language models and AI systems, the bulk of the world’s languages, and thus cultures and societies, have been neglected,” Badir said.

When asked about big tech companies’ efforts at multilingualism, Badir made a sharp distinction. “Big tech companies are building multilingual models to expand their markets, regardless of consent or context,” she said. The consequences are tangible. “For indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities establish any rules,” she said.

It’s not just about language

AI’s ability to speak language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is the way knowledge, traditions, memory and identity are passed from one generation to another,” she said. “So when technology can’t speak your language, it can’t preserve your culture either.”

Its vision for today’s AI is an open system modeled on the early Web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one is left out, and communities retain control of their own data.

Current’s first round of grants, announced last month, included the distribution of US$3.2 million to four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon.

The project in Masakan, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages ​​in the areas of health, agriculture and education; The Lebanese Institute for World Making is working to digitize Arab cultural history and contemporary practices into machine-readable databases controlled by communities (not technology companies). Portal sem Porteiras in Brazil is building offline AI tools with indigenous communities in the Amazon, keeping the data within the territory. The African Internet Rights Alliance in Kenya is developing auditing tools to make AI systems accountable across the continent.

Who owns the data?

On the issue of data ownership, Badir did not mince his words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in different societies, but one thing is certain: It shouldn’t be a Silicon Valley company trying to make a select few thousand people richer,” she told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bring in community experts before building anything, or write consent protocols down the track so communities can stop the process at any time.

None of the Current AI grantees have been able to fully solve the problem yet. But Badir believes that this is the goal. “Each of them has built this question into their work, rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes an excuse to let the government or tech company decide for everyone,” she said.

As for how much progress can be achieved by dividing the $3.2 million budget among four organizations, Badir says: “Size is not always the measure. This is the model of big tech companies.” “This might look like an indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool created in Kenya to be able to convey environmental knowledge in their own language.”

Stack construction

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open source chatbot put together in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and the MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the kit, including a language model, security tools, 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 joint open source AI stack, one designed to support Japanese language and culture, as well as communities across the Global South that have been largely ignored by dominant AI systems.