“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.

I realize any tech CEO is going to claim they're building a revolutionary product, but this hyperbole is unacceptable. No technology changes every aspect of everyone's life. Not even the internet and the smartphone has done that. There are tons of things I do on a weekly or even daily basis which I would be doing in virtually the same way without any computer technology available whatsoever.

Completely and utterly irresponsible. People who make claims like this should be publicly shamed.

I like the initiative.

But saying its like the www because it's open and available to all, is not a good analogy. The web is standardized, federated, and aligns protocols, technology, architecture, information together.

For a second I thought it said free of AI, then reread it and got disappointed.

Sounds like OpenAi 2.0 to me

In February at the India AI Summit, [Current AI] teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division....

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.

Great, now taxpayers are being forced to contribute to AI development.

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.

Nice to see Mozilla is spending donation money responsibly.

Worth noting that Alpha Chat relies on data sets owned by Common Crawl (via Fineweb2 on Kili, via Apertus). Common Crawl got caught for deceptive data scraping practices in 2025.

Ethics!