Unveiling our new strategy

Over the past few months, we spoke and listened with many of you: builders, civil society advocates, funders, researchers, and philanthropists. We focused on one key question: What is standing in the way of the public interest AI ecosystem?

Current AI was founded as a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership, bringing together governments, philanthropies and the private sector, with a funded pool and a collaborative builder mindset. We wanted to know: where do you think our point of highest leverage is, and how can we create an AI alternative system with staying power?

Your answers shaped our strategy and our pilot grant program. 

Our strategy

All over the world, from São Paulo to Paris to Kathmandu, builders and researchers are developing public interest AI products and building blocks. At this moment, we feel that our calling is to help transform these individual, decentralised initiatives into a coherent Public Interest AI movement. 

Anyone who’s ever been involved in any movement (I’ve been in a few!) knows this: there are no shortcuts or points of highest leverage. There is sustained work to support the changemakers, help them build the vision, and create space for connections and cross-pollination. 

So that’s exactly what we are going to do: We’re going to fund the changemakers, build the stack and bridge the people and the projects of the movement. 

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Fund. At the most fundamental level, we decided that to make the greatest impact, Current AI would be a builder-grantmaker. This means we're going to build alongside the community, not grant from above. Our grantmaking will prioritise themes that the private market is not incentivised to invest in, with a focus on actual, open, and auditable technology rather than research or policy papers. And we will design grant cohorts carefully in order to maximise potential for cross-pollination and collaboration to build shared learning between communities (first for our grantees, then for the global field)

Build. Ultimately, our mission is to build towards the full vertically integrated stack of Public Interest AI so that it is a viable alternative to closed AI and it becomes a sandbox for the community to imagine a collective vision for AI.  We will have two modalities: incubating projects to build the tech needed, or developing it internally ourselves. This could be infrastructure, apps, developer tools, documentation, or other. I will share the full vision of this in the coming weeks

Bridge. Technology companies operate out of a unified roadmap, coordinated timelines, and shared resources. What if the public interest  AI ecosystems worked the same way: working as a global network, sharing product roadmaps, jumping on each other’s issues list? We will bridge the people and projects that hold the movement together.

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