The nonprofit Current AI is accelerating the development of publicly accessible AI infrastructure, aiming to enable more languages and communities—especially those without reliable internet access or English-language environments—to use AI tools. The organization has recently advanced projects in India, Africa, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon, and has launched a new open-source chatbot.
Indian devices support 22 languages.
This year in February, Current AI partnered with Bhashini, India’s government language AI initiative, at the India AI Summit to launch Suno Sutra, an offline device. Compact in size and requiring no internet connection, it runs AI capabilities supporting 22 Indian languages and has been open-sourced for developers to further extend.
Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said that India has a vast number of languages and dialects, but existing AI systems still lack adequate coverage for them. She believes that if AI is to profoundly impact daily life, there must be a public-facing, freely accessible alternative—not one entirely dominated by private companies.
Commitment funds increased to $400 million
Current AI was founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne. Bdeir joined in January of this year, having previously led AI strategy at Mozilla. She told TechCrunch that Current AI operates through a public-private partnership model, bringing together government, businesses, and foundations to fund technology projects for the public good.
- The French government provides $100 million in startup funding.
- The total committed funds have now reached $400 million.
- The first round of funding distributed $3.2 million to four organizations.
Project deployment in Africa and the Amazon
The first round of funded projects is distributed across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. In Kenya, Masakhane is building AI datasets for over 50 African languages, with applications in healthcare, agriculture, and education. In Lebanon, the Institute for Worldmaking is compiling Arab cultural history and contemporary practices into machine-readable databases, with community control and ownership.
The Brazilian project Portal sem Porteiras collaborates with Indigenous Amazonian communities to develop offline AI tools, keeping data localized. Meanwhile, the African Internet Rights Alliance from Kenya is developing audit tools to assess accountability in AI systems across Africa.
Release Alpha Chat within seven weeks.
Earlier this month, Current AI launched the open-source chatbot Alpha Chat at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The product was collaboratively developed over seven weeks by ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and the MIT Media Lab, each contributing models, security tools, and computational resources.
In addition, Current AI has partnered with Japanese startup Sakana AI to jointly build an open-source AI stack. This system will support Japanese language and related cultural contexts, while also serving global South communities long overlooked by mainstream AI systems.