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. She shouldn’t have to.
That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. At the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, launching Suno Sutra, a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages.
Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies. 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.
“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,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said. The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today belongs to a private company.
Current’s first cohort grant round involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. Its projects include building AI datasets for more than 50 African languages in Masakhane, Kenya; digitizing Arab cultural history in Lebanon; and building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities.
