Current AI aims to build a public, open-source alternative to Big Tech

Founded by Martin Tisne and led by former Mozilla executive Ayah Bdeir, the organization seeks to dismantle the industry standard where private corporations own the foundational models shaping human knowledge. With $400 million in backing from the French government, the Ford Foundation, and others, Current AI functions as a public-private partnership. The goal is a digital ecosystem modeled on the early World Wide Web: decentralized, free, and accessible to all.

Protecting cultural sovereignty

Beyond simple translation, the nonprofit prioritizes cultural preservation. Current AI recently distributed $3.2 million to projects in Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. These initiatives focus on keeping data within local territories, such as the Portal sem Porteiras project in Brazil, which develops offline tools for Indigenous communities. By integrating consent protocols directly into the development pipeline, the organization empowers communities to stop data harvesting—a direct challenge to Big Tech firms that often scrape Indigenous languages for training data without oversight.

In Geneva, the group showcased Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by a coalition including MIT Media Lab and Hugging Face. Additionally, a partnership with Tokyo-based Sakana AI aims to construct a shared stack supporting Japanese and various languages across the Global South. For Bdeir, the success of these projects is not measured by traditional Silicon Valley metrics of scale, but by the ability of a local elder to pass down ecological knowledge using technology that finally speaks their language.