Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
非营利组织 Current AI 正致力于构建人人可用的“AI 万维网”
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. 印度农村的一位农民拍下了一张枯萎植物的照片。她想在网上搜索相关信息，但她不会说英语。她本不该为此受限。这正是非营利组织 Current AI 试图通过构建开放的公共 AI 基础设施来解决的问题。
In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. 今年 2 月，在印度 AI 峰会上，该组织与印度政府的 AI 语言部门 Bhashini 展开合作。其成果便是“Suno Sutra”（印地语意为“聆听编年史”），这是一款袖珍的离线设备，无需联网即可运行支持 22 种印度语言的 AI。
“In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on. Current AI 首席执行官 Ayah Bdeir 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示：“印度有数百种不同的语言和方言，而目前的 AI 并没有涵盖它们。”该设备采用开源模式，供开发者社区进行二次开发。
The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. 该非营利组织由 Martin Tisne 于 2025 年 2 月创立，发展迅速。上个月，它向四个组织的多个项目拨款 320 万美元；最近（上周），它还在日内瓦举行的“AI 造福人类峰会”（AI for Good Summit）上发布了一款开源 AI 聊天机器人。
Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019. Bdeir 在领导 Mozilla 的 AI 战略后，于今年 1 月加入该组织。她此前曾创立了 STEM 教育公司 littleBits，该公司在 2019 年被 Sphero 收购前，已惠及数百万儿童。
Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. 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. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said. 她告诉 TechCrunch，Current AI 以“公私合作伙伴关系”模式运营，汇集了政府、企业和慈善机构，共同资助公共利益技术。法国政府为 Current AI 提供了 1 亿美元的种子资金，福特基金会、麦克阿瑟基金会、DeepMind 和 Salesforce 也参与其中，使承诺的总资金达到 4 亿美元。“他们不是投资者，而是资助者，”Bdeir 说道。
The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company. “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.” 该组织旨在解决的问题非常直接：当今每一个主流 AI 系统，从 OpenAI 到 Google 再到 Anthropic，都归私营公司所有。“如果 AI 真的是一种变革性技术，如果它将改变每个人生活的方方面面，那么就必须有一个公共替代方案，”Bdeir 说，“就像万维网一样，免费提供给任何人使用。”
Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction. “And 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,” Bdeir said. 世界上半数的口语正面临灭绝。“由于英语主导了最大的语言模型和 AI 系统，世界上大部分语言，以及随之而来的文化和社区，都被抛在了后面，”Bdeir 说。
When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said. 当被问及大型科技公司在多语言方面的推动时，Bdeir 划清了界限。“大型科技公司构建多语言模型是为了扩大市场，”她说，“而不考虑同意或语境。”后果是具体的。“对于土著语言来说，在社区制定任何规则之前，传教士的圣经译本就成了训练数据，”她说。
Not just about language
不仅仅是语言问题
An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either,” she said. AI 说某种语言的能力只是它需要学习的一部分。“语言是知识、传统、记忆和身份代代相传的方式。因此，当一种技术无法说你的语言时，它也无法承载你的文化，”她说。
Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data. 她对 Current AI 的愿景是一个以早期互联网为蓝本的开放系统，让改进惠及所有人，没有人被拒之门外，社区也能保持对其自身数据的控制。
Current’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. Current 上个月宣布的首批拨款涉及向肯尼亚、黎巴嫩和巴西亚马逊地区的四个组织投入 320 万美元。肯尼亚 Masakhane 的项目涉及构建涵盖 50 多种非洲语言的 AI 数据集，用于医疗、农业和教育；黎巴嫩的 Institute for Worldmaking 正在将阿拉伯文化历史和当代实践数字化为机器可读的数据库，并由社区（而非科技公司）进行控制。
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. 巴西的 Portal sem Porteiras 正在与亚马逊土著社区合作构建离线 AI 工具，将数据保留在当地。肯尼亚的非洲互联网权利联盟（African Internet Rights Alliance）正在开发审计工具，以确保整个非洲大陆的 AI 系统承担责任。
Who owns the data?
谁拥有数据？
On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn’t mince words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,” she told TechCrunch. 在数据所有权问题上，Bdeir 直言不讳。“关于不同社区中谁拥有数据，有各种不同的模型和提议，但有一点是肯定的：它不应该是一家硅谷公司，试图让少数几千人变得更富有，”她告诉 TechCrunch。
The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point. 该非营利组织的方法是将模型和数据存储在本地，在构建任何东西之前引入社区专家，或者将同意协议写入流程中，以便社区可以在任何时候停止该过程。
None of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.” Current AI 的受资助者中还没有人完全解决了这个问题。但 Bdeir 认为这正是重点所在。“他们每个人都将这个问题纳入了他们的工作中，”她说，“而不是接受通常的默认做法，即以复杂性为借口，让政府或科技公司为所有人做决定。”
As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.” 至于 320 万美元的预算分给四个组织能取得多大进展，Bdeir 说：“规模并不总是衡量标准。那是大型科技公司的范式，”她说。“这可能表现为巴西亚马逊地区的一位土著长者使用在肯尼亚构建的工具，从而能够用他们自己的语言传承生态知识。”
Building the stack
构建技术栈
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot 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. 本月初在日内瓦，Current 推出了 Alpha Chat，这是一个由包括 Hugging Face、Mozilla 和麻省理工学院媒体实验室在内的十个组织组成的联盟在七周内组装完成的开源聊天机器人。每个贡献者都贡献了技术栈的一部分，包括语言模型、安全工具和计算能力。
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. Current AI 还与总部位于东京的初创公司 Sakana AI 达成了一项协议，该公司以其所谓的“主权 AI”（Sovereign AI）研究而闻名。这两个组织计划构建一个共享的开源 AI 技术栈，旨在支持日语和日本文化，同时也支持全球南方那些被主流 AI 系统很大程度上忽视的社区。