Current AI, a nonprofit founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is trying to build open, public AI infrastructure that anyone can use for free — an approach its CEO, Ayah Bdeir, compares directly to the early World Wide Web. "If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it's going to change every aspect of everyone's life, there has to be a public alternative," Bdeir said. "Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free."

A public-private coalition with real money behind it

Current AI operates as a public-private partnership: the French government seeded it with $100 million, and the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Google DeepMind and Salesforce have since joined as funders, bringing total committed backing to $400 million, with an ambition to mobilize $2.5 billion over five years. Bdeir, who joined as CEO in January after leading Mozilla's AI strategy and previously founded the STEM company littleBits, is charged with turning those commitments into shipped infrastructure rather than pledges. The organization's stated priorities are expanding access to high-quality public datasets, funding open-source AI tooling, and building independent measures of AI's social and environmental impact.

First concrete build: an offline device for 22 Indian languages

The clearest evidence of that work so far is Suno Sutra — Hindi for "listening chronicles" — a pocket-sized, fully offline device that runs AI across 22 Indian languages without an internet connection. It's the product of a partnership Current AI struck with Bhashini, the Indian government's AI language division, announced at the India AI Summit earlier this year. The device's design is open-sourced, letting outside developer communities build on top of it rather than depending on a single vendor's cloud stack.

The project is a concrete test of Current AI's broader thesis: that language access and offline availability, not just raw model capability, are what determine whether AI actually reaches the roughly half of the world's population that current large labs' products underserve. With frontier labs in the US and China racing on capability and compute, Current AI's bet is that a public option focused on access and openness — funded by governments and philanthropy rather than venture capital — fills a gap none of the commercial players have strong incentives to close themselves.