Make room for yet another partnership on AI: Current AI, which is being billed as a public interest initiative focused on fostering and steering development of artificial intelligence in societally beneficial directions, was announced at the French AI Action summit on Monday with an initial $400 million in pledges from backers and a plan to pull in $2.5 billion over the next five years.Such figures might seem like small beer when it comes to AI investment, with the French president fresh from trumpeting a private support package worth around $112 billion (which itself pales beside U.S. investments aiming to accelerate the tech). But the partnership is not focused on compute so its backers believe such relatively modest sums will still be able to make a difference in key areas where AI could make a critical difference to advancing the public interest whether in AI for healthcare or supporting climate goals. Under the top-line focus on the enabling environment for public interest AI, the initiative has a number of stated aims including pushing to widen access to high quality public and private data-sets for AI training; support for open source infrastructure & tooling to boost AI transparency and security; and support for developing systems to measure AIs social and environmental impact.Its founder, Martin Tisn, said the goal is to create a financial vehicle to provide a North Star for public financing of critical efforts, such as for example bringing AI to bear on combating cancers or coming up with treatments for long COVID. I think whats happening is youve got a data bottle-neck coming in artificial intelligence, because were running out of road with data on the web, effectively and here, what we need is to really unlock innovations in how to make data accessible and available, he told TechCrunch.On open source, he said the goal is to support ecosystem building by directing investment with the aim of ensuring that open source tools are as seamlessly usable as a proprietary tools.When it comes to AI accountability, the partnership hopes to unify the field working towards buy-in on standards for auditing AI systems that are accountable on merit of having the deep involvement by different populations and communities who are focused on the problems that we want [AI to help with]. For understandable reasons, theres a lot of focus around the huge [AI] investments. Thats different, he also told us. Our focus here is around the public interest. Our focus is on smaller models. Were not optimizing for AGI [artificial general intelligence] Were looking at smaller models where you need really high value specific data sets.For example, on Parkinsons disease theres been an amazing standardization of data sets, put forward by the Michael J Fox Foundation like were looking at really specific stuff to make a difference in peoples lives.Europe and the global south chip inThe initiative is being backed by a mix of public and private actors with governments including France, Germany, Chile, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria among the nine countries listed as partners at launch (note: the U.S. is not a participant, neither are any governments across Asia so the AI effort is being drive by policymakers in Europe and the Global South. The other listed countries are Finland, Slovenia and Switzerland). That said, also listed in the PR as core partners are (U.S.) tech giants Google and Salesforce. On the private sector side, Tisn said the partnership is keen to work with industry research labs doing cutting edge work (such as in life sciences); with technology companies that have a distinct positioning vs the mainstream, such as as a result of how they and/or their customers are using open source, and with other large companies that are users and buyers of open source products; and with startups that are pushing the envelop on openness. Other core partners for Current AI that have been named at launch are the French government (which is in the spotlight on AI governance this week as its hosting the AI Action Summit in Paris); along with several philanthropic backers namely: The Ford Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and AI Collaborative the latter being an Omidyar Group-backed AI governance policy lobby organization that sits within billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pams network. AI Collaboratives CEO, Tisn, is also the founder of Current AI. Discussing the gap Current AIs backers are seeking to fill, he argued theres a gap for a public-private funding vehicle that can build momentum behind efforts to drive AI development along public interest lines. Its not a lack of public interest projects in AI, its a massive fragmentation in the field and how we can just work on a much bigger scale, he told TechCrunch during a call, saying the initiative aims to drive public and private financing at scale of critical public interest AI projects. Some of which already exist, he continued, saying its therefore a question of really bringing them together, but focusing focusing on effort so that we can help develop the next AlphaFold, a reference to Google DeepMinds pioneering AI system for accurately predicting the structures of proteins inside the human body. The private sector is rightly focused on private interests and works at a huge scale and is doing that with, you know, compute investments in the order of the tens of billions per quarter so we were trying to figure out what it is that we could do to really make a difference, Tisn also told us, noting: AlphaFold was developed on the base of a public data set, including, but not limited to the Protein Data Bank. So a big focus of ours is going to be on data from that perspective.Public interest AI ecosystem supportEfforts to wide access to health data could for example focus on supporting development of privacy-preserving technologies to enable more patients to share their data for AI research, he suggested. There isnt another partnership set up which is really designed to bring the whole field together and to bring together public financing at scale, he claimed. Boiling the effort down further Tisn said Current AIs work will span three tracks: Firstly providing financial support to the sector in the form of direct financial contributions. It will also seek to play an incubating role aiming to, for example, support research work to nurture AI innovations. Thirdly, it will work on aligning funding so that different funders can work jointly based on shared goals and objectives. So here its backers hope to bring together diverse public interest AI support efforts and amplify impact.The partnership will deploy around half its donated funds in the form of grant awards. The other half is being pegged for aligned funding efforts around openness, around data and accountability, which Tisn said will include hitting really specific goals and objectives per program (that are as yet to be defined). This isnt a this isnt a policy or a regulation play. Its really a building play, he added. Current AIs PR includes a wider list of supporters and champions for the initiative citing an open letter of support from a span industry figures including the likes of Arthur Mensch, co-Founder & CEO of the French large language model (LLM) maker Mistral; serial entrepreneurs and investors Brent Hoberman and Reid Hoffman; Clement Delangue, CEO of AI firm Hugging Face; and Fidji Simo, an OpenAI board member and also CEO and chair of Instacart, among others. In the letter they write: To achieve the best out of AI, society must be in charge.In practice, this means ensuring that high-value datasets are accessible in privacy preserving and safe ways, incentivising the development of smaller, open AI models that cater to peoples needs and are more environmentally friendly, and scaling up open-source AI to improve transparency, safety and accessibility for all, they go on, adding: The future of AI should belong to all of us.Current AI expects to be unveiling fresh supporters and backers in the coming months, with Tisn saying theyre particularly keen to work with the Gates Foundation given its focus on key verticals like healthcare. If youre curious about their choice of name (Current AI), he said they were shooting for something that grounds in the here and now i.e. current-gen AI, not sci-fi stuff that might be coming down the pipe as well as wanting to play on ideas of electrical current and even diversity (think the current of a river and all the life than can teem inside it).Its important to have more diversity in the AI field, he stressed, adding: We spent a lot of time in AI worrying about a really distant future and what might happen So this is really an effort to focus on the opportunities and the harms today.