Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
Current AI, a non-profit building AI that leaves no one culture behind, has made remarkable progress across devices, AI chat and more. A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn't speak English.
Key Takeaways
- That's the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure.
In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini , the Indian government's AI language division.
- Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy.
She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019 .
- " Half the world's spoken languages face extinction .
"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.
- "Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next.
So when a technology can't speak your language, it can't hold your culture either," she said.
- On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn't mince words.
Stats & Key Facts
- #The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for "listening chronicles," a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required.
- #2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva .
- #The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce - bringing total committed funding to $400 million.
- #Current's first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.
That's the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini , the Indian government's AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for "listening chronicles," a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required.
"In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them," Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on. The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast.
2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva . Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019 .
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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