Someone Is Trying to Build a World Wide Web of AI — and It Might Actually Matter

I keep coming back to one uncomfortable thought: every major AI system you touch today belongs to a private company. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic — all of them. There is no public option. No equivalent of the web itself, the thing anyone could build on for free.

A nonprofit called Current AI is trying to change that. Their pitch is blunt: an open, public "World Wide Web of AI" — infrastructure anyone can use, free for all, the way the actual web was supposed to work.

Here's what gets me about this. They're not some garage dream. They launched in February 2025 and they've already pulled $400 million in committed funding — $100 million seeded by the French government, then Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce piled on. Their CEO, Ayah Bdeir, came over from Mozilla's AI strategy this January. This is a serious, well-funded operation.

And they're shipping, not just fundraising. Last month they handed out $3.2 million in grants across four organizations. Just last week they launched an open-source chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The most striking thing they built is Suno Sutra — a pocket-sized offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages with no internet required. It's open-sourced, so developers can build on it.

The reason this matters goes deeper than language access. Bdeir makes a point I can't stop thinking about: Big Tech builds multilingual models to expand its market "regardless of consent or context." Her example is brutal — for Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before those communities set any rules about it. The web was built so anyone could publish. AI is being built so a handful of companies can extract.

I genuinely don't know how to feel about the odds here. $400 million sounds huge until you compare it to what OpenAI burns in a quarter. But the framing is right, and the people are credible, and the first artifacts are real and open. If "public AI infrastructure" is ever going to exist, it starts with someone deciding to build it out in the open instead of behind a paywall.

That's the bet Current AI is making. I'm watching to see if the next grant cycle produces something the rest of us can actually use.