TechCrunch (Kate Park), July 19, 2026 — Nonprofit Current AI is building open, public AI infrastructure as an alternative to privately owned frontier systems.
Organization:
- Founded February 2025 by Martin Tisne; CEO Ayah Bdeir joined January 2026 after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy (previously founded littleBits).
- Operates as a public-private partnership: governments, companies, philanthropies as funders (not equity investors).
- French government seeded 400 million.
Products / programs:
- Suno Sutra (“listening chronicles”): pocket-sized offline device with Bhashini (India government AI language division) running AI in 22 Indian languages; open-sourced for developers.
- Last month: $3.2M grants to four organizations (Masakhane Kenya — 50+ African language datasets; Lebanon Institute for Worldmaking — Arab cultural databases under community control; Brazil Portal sem Porteiras — offline AI with Indigenous Amazon communities; Kenya African Internet Rights Alliance — AI audit tools).
- Earlier this month in Geneva (AI for Good Summit): Alpha Chat open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by ~10 orgs including Hugging Face, Mozilla, MIT Media Lab.
- Deal with Sakana AI (Tokyo) to build a shared open-source stack for Japanese language/culture and Global South communities.
Thesis (Bdeir): if AI is transformative, there must be a public alternative “like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.” Critiques Big Tech multilingual models as market expansion without consent; argues Indigenous language training data often scraped before communities set rules.
Source: TechCrunch.