Current AI, a nonprofit founded by Martin Tisné, is developing open public AI infrastructure aimed at serving languages and communities largely overlooked by major AI systems. In February, the organization partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, to launch Suno Sutra, an offline device supporting 22 Indian languages without requiring internet access. CEO Ayah Bdeir, who joined after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, said existing AI systems fail to represent the vast majority of the world’s languages.
Current AI operates as a public-private partnership, backed by $400 million in committed funding from the French government, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. Bdeir said the goal is to create an open AI alternative comparable to the early World Wide Web, where communities retain control over their own data and cultural knowledge.
The organization recently allocated $3.2 million in grants to four projects spanning Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon, focused on language datasets, cultural digitization, offline AI tools, and AI accountability auditing. Current AI also launched an open-source chatbot, AlphaChat, built in seven weeks with contributors including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab, and struck a partnership with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting underrepresented languages worldwide.
