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Current AI Partners With Sakana AI on Open-Source Language Stack

Prime Highlights 

  • Current AI launched Suno Sutra, an offline AI device supporting 22 Indian languages, with Bhashini in February.  
  • The nonprofit granted $3.2 million to four organisations in Kenya, Lebanon and Brazil last month.  

Key Facts 

  • Current AI is a nonprofit building open, public AI infrastructure, founded in February last year by Martin Tisne.  
  • Total committed funding for Current AI stands at $400 million, led by a $100 million French government contribution.  

Background 

Nonprofit Current AI is building open, public AI infrastructure to close language gaps left by mainstream AI systems. In February, at the India AI Summit, the organisation partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division, to launch Suno Sutra, an offline, pocket-sized device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages without needing internet access. 

Current AI chief executive Ayah Bdeir said India’s hundreds of languages and dialects remain poorly represented in AI systems, and the device is designed to change that. It is open-source, allowing developer communities to build on it further. 

Founded in February last year by Martin Tisne, Current AI has moved quickly. Last month, it granted $3.2 million across four organisations working in Kenya, Lebanon and the Brazilian Amazon on projects covering health, farming, education, cultural digitisation and AI accountability. Earlier this month, it also launched an open-source chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, built in seven weeks by ten organisations including Hugging Face, Mozilla and MIT Media Lab. 

Bdeir, who joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy, said Current AI operates as a public-private partnership funding public interest technology. The French government seeded the initiative with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind and Salesforce, bringing total committed funding to $400 million. 

The nonprofit has also struck a partnership with Tokyo-based Sakana AI to build a shared open-source AI stack supporting Japanese and other underserved languages globally.