A nonprofit is trying to build a free, open version of AI before Big Tech locks in every language but English

[VectorDB Cobra]

Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025 and now led by former Mozilla AI strategy chief Ayah Bdeir, is trying to build open, public AI infrastructure specifically for languages and communities that dominant AI systems have largely left behind. Its pitch is direct, every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company, and if AI is going to change every aspect of everyone's life, there has to be a public alternative, available to anyone for free, the way the early World Wide Web was

One concrete example is Suno Sutra, built in partnership with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, a pocket sized, fully offline device that runs AI across 22 Indian languages with no internet connection required, open sourced for developer communities to build on. Bdeir's framing is blunt about why this matters, half the world's spoken languages face extinction, and since English drives the largest AI models, most of the world's languages, and the cultures and communities carried through them, get left behind entirely. She draws a sharp line against Big Tech's own multilingual efforts too, arguing those expand market reach regardless of consent or context, pointing to missionary Bible translations becoming AI training data for Indigenous languages before those communities ever set any rules around it

The nonprofit operates as a public-private partnership, seeded with 100 million dollars from the French government and joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Google DeepMind and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to 400 million dollars, funders rather than investors, as Bdeir put it. Its first grant round, announced last month, put 3.2 million dollars into four projects, building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages in Kenya, digitizing Arab cultural history in Lebanon under community rather than corporate control, building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities in Brazil that keep data within their own territory, and developing AI accountability audit tools across Africa

Most recently, Current AI launched Alpha Chat, an open source chatbot assembled in just seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations including Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab, unveiled at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, and struck a partnership with Tokyo based Sakana AI to build a shared open source AI stack supporting Japanese language and culture alongside Global South communities. Asked how much progress a budget this size can realistically achieve, Bdeir pushed back on the premise itself, saying scale isn't always the right measure, that's the Big Tech paradigm, and that success can look as modest as an Indigenous elder in the Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language

Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

[Mia86]

The missionary Bible translation becoming AI training data example is such a concrete and genuinely unsettling illustration of consent being skipped entirely in how Big Tech's multilingual push actually works in practice