Right now, the most powerful AI systems in the world are all owned by a small number of private companies. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic control the models that power chatbots, image generators, and search tools. If you want to use one, you play by their rules.
A new nonprofit called Current AI thinks that is a problem. Martin Tisne founded Current AI in February 2025, and the group is moving quickly to deliver what its CEO describes as a public alternative. "Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free," CEO Ayah Bdeir said.
The French government provided a $100 million seed investment to Current AI, while additional backers include the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce, raising the total committed funds to $400 million. "They're not investors; they're funders," Bdeir said.
That money is already going to work. In February, Current AI distributed $3.2 million in grant funding to four different organizations for various projects. One of those grants is supporting the Masakhane project in Kenya, which creates AI datasets covering over 50 African languages, focusing on health, agriculture, and education.
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Current AI's CEO, Ayah Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits. "When a technology can't speak your language, it can't hold your culture either," she said.
Linguists estimate that approximately half of all spoken languages globally are at risk of disappearing. "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 said.
"Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market," she said, "regardless of consent or context." She pointed out that "for Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules."
Current AI is trying to change that. The organization recently introduced Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot that was built in just seven weeks through a partnership of ten groups such as Hugging Face, Mozilla, and the MIT Media Lab.
And in India, where hundreds of languages and dialects are spoken, Current AI teamed up with the government's AI language division, Bhashini, to create a device called Suno Sutra. This portable device operates without an internet connection and supports AI in 22 Indian languages.
When a reporter questioned whether significant progress was possible given the budget divided among four groups, Bdeir said, "Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm."
Such efforts represent a shift away from the centralized model of corporate AI, prioritizing accessibility and cultural relevance. By working with local organizations and governments, Current AI aims to ensure that the benefits of AI extend beyond wealthy, English-speaking populations. The group's early projects demonstrate that even modest funding can produce tangible tools for communities often ignored by big tech.
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