Current AI, a nonprofit focused on building open, public AI infrastructure, unveiled an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The initiative, called Alpha Chat, was assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power. The chatbot is part of Current AI’s broader mission to create an AI system modeled on the World Wide Web, ensuring accessibility and control for all communities. The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, operates as a 'public-private partnership' bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech. 'They’re not investors; they’re funders,' said Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir. '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.'

The nonprofit’s approach emphasizes local storage of models and data, involving community experts and writing consent protocols into the pipeline to ensure communities can halt the process at any point. Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored. Bdeir highlighted the importance of multilingual AI, noting that 'half the world’s spoken languages face extinction' and that 'with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind.'

Current AI’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent. 'Every one of them has built the question into their work,' Bdeir said, 'rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.'

Source: techcrunch