Current AI builds open-source AI infrastructure for underserved languages

Nonprofit Current AI, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is racing to create public AI infrastructure modeled on the early web. At the India AI Summit in February, it partnered with Bhashini, India's government AI language division, to produce Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device running AI in 22 Indian languages. CEO Ayah Bdeir, formerly of Mozilla and littleBits, leads the organization. Current AI operates as a public-private partnership seeded with $100 million from the French government, plus funding from Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, totaling $400 million. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to four organizations in Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. Projects include Masakhane building AI datasets across 50+ African languages, Lebanon's Institute for Worldmaking digitizing Arab cultural history, Brazil's Portal sem Porteiras creating offline AI tools for Indigenous Amazon communities, and Kenya's African Internet Rights Alliance developing audit tools. In Geneva at the AI for Good Summit, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. It also struck a deal with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese and Global South communities. Bdeir emphasizes that AI should not be controlled by Silicon Valley companies, and that communities must own their data.