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Nonprofit AI: Mozilla Report on AI as a Public Resource

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 53

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Carolyn Woodard covers a growing counter-movement to concentrated AI power  and what it means for nonprofits thinking about data sovereignty, open-source models, and their own agency in a moment that can feel overwhelming.

Mozilla's recent State of Open Source AI Report frames this shift as a "Rebel Alliance" against winner-take-all AI development. Mozilla is deploying $1.4 billion to seed an open, trustworthy AI ecosystem, joined by more than 55 organizations. The report makes the case that open-source models are closing the capability gap with closed commercial systems, and that communities, not just corporations, can own and control their AI.

Carolyn also introduces Current AI, a nonprofit backed by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the French government, which is building what it calls a worldwide web of AI: free, public, and available to anyone the way the early internet was. One example: an offline device running AI in 22 Indian languages, built so communities own their data entirely. A Current AI grantee in Brazil is doing similar work with indigenous Amazon communities.

This episode covers:

  • Why Mozilla's open-source AI report matters for nonprofits skeptical of locking into commercial platforms with opaque pricing and data practices.
  • How indigenous and Global South communities are leading on data sovereignty, and what that model could mean for mission-driven organizations here.
  • The case for staying informed even if you're not ready to act: understanding the landscape is itself a form of agency.
  • One for-profit alternative worth knowing: Change Agent AI, built by, for, and with the social sector, on its own infrastructure without big tech servers, currently $25 per seat.

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Carolyn Woodard

Hello and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Midweek Nonprofit AI podcast. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host. I have my standard disclaimer that I am not an IT expert. I'm not even a particularly tech techie oriented person, but I'm so fascinated by AI and this moment where nonprofits and AI are really exploring this together and learning together.

Carolyn Woodard

So I hope that these podcasts help you get smarter together with us as we learn a little bit of news, maybe a couple of resources, and let you go on your way.

Carolyn Woodard

So this week I wanted to talk about something that I've been feeling for a while now. It's come out in some of these podcasts earlier, and that kind of nagging feeling that no matter what we do, these big tech companies and this moment, this AI bubble is just gonna roll over everything in its path with all of its money and all of their influence, and they can afford billion-dollar lobbyists. And what do we have, the citizens and the people who are concerned about the environment, the impacts of AI on all these communities that we care about, the way it's changing our brains. So all of these issues that we kind of feel like it's this huge, huge issue that what can one little person do against it? So they have the data, they have the models, they're building the infrastructure, all the data centers.

Carolyn Woodard

And it's like I said, just a couple of corporations, like the big six tech companies, and some very wealthy white men who it feels like they have all of the power, and the rest of us just have to have this wave wash over us.

Carolyn Woodard

So I've been seeing some indications of a counter movement forming and um different threads that are kind of coming together. And I don't know where it's gonna go, but I want to talk about it this week as a way to think about the agency that we have, the choices that we make, and some alternative ideas for where AI is going and AI control and management and power. Um, so

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to start with a major report from Mozilla. They are the nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, and they are calling this counter-movement the Rebel Alliance to resist this concentrated AI power. And that's their phrase. I didn't come up with that, but it's in the report. So I'm gonna share the report uh URL with you in the show notes, and you can read it yourself. Um, but I wanted to start with the uh opening letter from their CTO because he talks about something we've talked about too: native local control over your data, your culture, your language, your AI.

Carolyn Woodard

So he talks about maybe a Maori broadcaster in New Zealand training speech models for a language that's too small for any market under a license that keeps that data with its own people. Or farmers in East Africa diagnosing a disease with their cassava with a model that runs just on a phone, uh not online, in fields that, you know, don't have, you know, you'd have to use a satellite hookup to get online. He also says, well, what about a public consortium in Switzerland that trains a national AI model on public supercomputers and shares everything transparently, the weights, the data, the training code, everything that was used to build that model.

Carolyn Woodard

And in his letter, he says, you know, what if none of them ask for permission? What if they own it? They do it, they they don't have to pay for the licenses, and they don't have to buy into the system where six companies own everything.

Carolyn Woodard

And so this is what they're calling the rebel alliance idea against this concentrated AI power. And the evil empire in this analogy is the idea of centralized profit motivated winner-take all attack. Uh

Carolyn Woodard

Mozilla itself is deploying 1.4 billion in reserves to seed an open, trustworthy AI ecosystem. And they already have more than 55 big companies and organizations working on it with them, which you can read about in the report. And

Carolyn Woodard

I think, you know, even months ago in conferences and on LinkedIn, I think we've been hearing quote-unquote philanthropy talk about, you know, if we want an AI future to be different, philanthropy, nonprofits, people have to be in the room at the table helping make the decisions about what happens with AI. And we saw the UN report, we saw the papal encyclical about humanity and how when people are involved in this decision making, not just one or two people who are out for profit, but people, you know, in general, uh, they ask different things and they get different products and they have different concerns for security, for ownership, for environmental impact. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

So I think this report is just so interesting in that line of big reports that are coming out about AI and society and humanity. And this idea that open source AI could close the capability gap with closed models and LLMs from the big tech companies.

Carolyn Woodard

And we're seeing, I mean, I guess we're seeing it a little bit in the Chinese models that are like do the same thing almost as well or as well and cost a fraction of the price, and then could open AI, truly open AI, like an open model, also have the capabilities that uh something like Claude has or um or Chat GPT.

Carolyn Woodard

So um just to be transparent, I use Claude, so I am, I guess, not completely neutral. Um, I've tried all of them: Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and I, uh, ChatGPT, and I really um Claude does a lot of what I needed to do. You know, you can you know choose which model you're using, so you can choose the lighter, uh, older model that doesn't take as much energy. So that's something you can think about. Um, but I just

Carolyn Woodard

I'm so interested in this idea from Mozilla, and I want to keep an eye on it, and I wanted to draw your attention to it because um it also in their report, they talk about that moment a couple of months ago where Claude was rolling out their Mythos, and the United States government said, Hey, wait a minute, hold up. You're creating capacity for some actors that we're not sure we're secure against. So can you hold off on releasing that?

Carolyn Woodard

And it was, if you remember, it was a big to-do, but it was also interesting because if you had started using that mythos, they could turn it off at the source. And I think a lot of organizations and companies are thinking about this. You own the license, right? And if the pricing models change, if what if you embed a process in an AI tool and you need that AI tool to make, you know, it's an agent, it makes something happen, and then the company just changes the pricing or takes away, you know, turns off the off switch. Uh, what would you do in that case?

Carolyn Woodard

So it's interesting to think of like more of a Linux idea of an open source AI that would be available to um to be developed and that would have tools developed on it that didn't need to be hooked up to the grid, didn't use quite as much energy once, you know, once they're designed. So so interesting.

Carolyn Woodard

And it's something we know that of course, uh, you know, communities that, you know, he talks about in his letter, uh, people with indigenous languages and indigenous cultures are in places where the grid is really stressed already. So they don't want to be using an AI that further taxes the uh environment. Um, but also companies, you know, like if you could use a tool that had more reliability and had a lower uh environmental impact, I think a lot of companies, especially if it were cheaper, would be really interested in that.

Carolyn Woodard

So it'll be interesting to see if vendors create products uh in this dynamic, in this model. Um and especially, I think now is just the moment. If you've been following along on pricing, if you've talked into any friends who are in for-profit um businesses, like they are really upset about pricing. They're getting charged for tokens. They don't know what a token is. You know, their CEO told them they had to use AI and everything, and their CFO is saying, like, wait, this is like 10 times our budget. What are you doing? And the companies can just charge you that. So it's a really interesting time to be thinking about and looking at like this larger economic and political and power structure around AI. So stay tuned.

Carolyn Woodard

I think the lesson for nonprofits is um, you know, a lot of us are not bleeding edge. We don't like to be on the bleeding edge of technology. We're skeptical of a bubble. We want to wait for the market to, you know, kind of calm down and uh for the market vendors that are going to be stable to emerge. So we can really see where there's a value. And so we can put it in a grant proposal, like this is an industry standard, and now we're gonna use this AI. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

So you don't have to be purchasing a certain AI this year, maybe even to want to stay informed about what's happening in this bigger picture and think about those models. You know, could there be something that was a more open source AI? Could there be something we've talked about before in this podcast about could you run AI locally?

Carolyn Woodard

And this idea, I looked at this video that was talking about these devices that you can use in India that aren't online at all, but they have an AI embedded in them that can do 22 different languages and answer questions about your crops or a fertilizer that you're using, or you know, a health issue that you have. So so interesting.

Carolyn Woodard

And of course, the billions of people around the country that are super smart and super into AI and really interested in making these models work, they're thinking of all, they're being entrepreneurial and uh you know visionary. And I think a lot of nonprofits are in that space too. Like you, after you start using AI, you can see like, oh, I wonder if they could do this, which could really change how my nonprofit operates and it would be more effective. And it especially if it could be locally controlled.

Carolyn Woodard

And um, you know, those LLMs that we we talked about, like Notebook from Gemini that just rebranded itself this week, but where you can give an LLM your library of resources. So it's not making stuff up from what it saw on Reddit, but it's going into your program reports, your FAQ, your all of your institutional knowledge that you've built up over time, and it's only using that library to formulate its answers. You know, nonprofits are already taking advantage of that. So I just think this is such a, well, it's such an interesting time overall, but keep this in mind and keep an eye on it. I'll be watching it as well to see what happens with this kind of different model. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

I did read an article in the Atlantic uh this week called Generative AI is an Engineering Disaster. I'm gonna spend some time to sit with it and uh look up some more resources and uh look at what some of the environmental organizations are doing, big nonprofits around the environment.

Carolyn Woodard

Because uh several months ago I was looking into this question of data centers and the build-out and how for the AI companies, they also like they may be an a weird ally to have in this moment because they also want their electricity costs to go down. They also want reliable water where their data centers are. Um, and so, in some ways, like they're the huge, you know, 800-pound players in this space. And so, with how much it's costing them, they have this huge incentive to bring down those costs. So to have reliable electricity, to not be drawing off our grid, to, you know, have the goodwill will of their local population as well. And so thinking about their incentives and time frame to make those changes to more renewable energy or um, you know, better stewarding of the environment.

Carolyn Woodard

And so this Atlantic article is not hopeful. I mean, I guess it is hopeful in the sense that it sees a collapse coming, that the build-out is not nearly going to be adequate to the amount of energy that those data centers that they're building need. So we'll see. I'm gonna talk about that in a future episode, but um, yeah.

Carolyn Woodard

So I want to get back to this more hopeful story. Um, there's a nonprofit called Current AI, which was backed by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the French government, and others. Um, and it's building what they call a worldwide web of AI. So this is going back to this idea of open source AI and getting away from the situation we find ourselves in now where every major AI system is built by and belongs to a private company. And those private companies are following a profit motive, uh, not a humanity-based motive, right?

Carolyn Woodard

So if AI is going to affect every aspect of everyone's life, they reason that there should be a public alternative, free, open, available to anyone, the way the early World Wide Web was. And they created this device, which I just talked about, called Suno Sutra, uh, which runs an AI entirely locally on an unconnected device. Uh as I said, it works in 22 Indian languages because India has hundreds of languages and dialects, uh, and most AI is not built on any of them. So it uh collects uh, or when it is based on a local language, it may have collected or scraped that community language data without any consent.

Carolyn Woodard

So this device is open sourced, so communities can work with it, build it, use it, and it's like I said, it's not connected. So it doesn't go back to other models or other companies. It's not being exploited or extractive. It is built so that a community can, similar to that notebook model, of you can build on this very local AI, a very local library to do a very specific local thing that you need an AI to do.

Carolyn Woodard

One of the grant recipients from Current AI is in Brazil. They're building offline AI tools with indigenous Amazon communities. All of the data stays within the territory and belongs to the community. Um, so that is just we've talked before about the indigenous communities uh leading the way on data sovereignty and this big moment that this movement is having. Um, and so this I thought was just an interesting again, another example of that on a different continent.

Carolyn Woodard

So, this is an example of that idea of data sovereignty uh in the hands of the people who own that data about themselves. So, if you have more questions about that, you can go to uh some of the resources that I'm gonna share in the show notes about data sovereignty. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

If you want something you want to look into today that is built on these kinds of values, I've I've mentioned it before, but there is a company called ChangeAgent AI. Um, it is a for-profit company. Um, so it's not the same category as current AI or Mozilla, but it runs its own model on its own infrastructure. So it doesn't use a Chat GPT model, and it uh doesn't use big tech servers. Uh you can look into it if it's something that you're interested in. They are particularly marketing toward like um unions, grassroots organizers, any organizations that might have a lot of concerns about where their data is going to and what model they're using, who, what capitalists they are helping out with their license fees, all that sort of thing. So that might be good to look into. Um it's $25 a seat right now. Uh

Carolyn Woodard

You do need to vet any company that you sign up with. So this is not an endorsement, just uh want to point you toward that. And there are a couple of others, but that's a kind of big one that's getting a lot of attention, Change Agent AI.

Carolyn Woodard

We've talked before about this idea that uh nonprofits and other organizations might be able to bring AI off-grid. So you would have your own energy source, your own cooling source, your own AI, maybe an open source model that you had purchased a one-time purchase or just was free to use, a public good. And then you could build uh something on that that used your own data and you know stayed in your own possession. So really interesting to think about going off-grid with something like this, and if that will address some of the questions and concerns that a lot of people in nonprofits have, a lot of citizens generally have, and uh what that would cost and how feasible it would be, and how technical you would have to be to be able to do something like that. Will there be products that nonprofits can purchase that are quote unquote off-grid? So just be interesting to see where this all goes.

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to give like just a little bit of hope and uh you know come back to my theme that uh we do have agency, and there are a lot of really smart people in this sphere that are thinking about these questions at this level and not just working for the big tech companies and not just trying to make as much profit as they can and whatever happens to the planet, who cares?

Carolyn Woodard

So uh if you're trying to figure out which AI tool you need to use, um, you that's a fair question. And I've said before it's difficult because a lot of the commercial companies right now, Claude, Anthropic, uh, Copilot, Gemini, Chat GPT, uh, they make it really uh difficult to find out. Like how where does their model come from? What are they doing with your data? Uh, where does their energy come from? What data center are you using? All of that stuff.

Carolyn Woodard

I just talked about like, oh, we could have off-grid AI. That's not available right now for your office. So if you want to do stuff right now, uh that we're not there yet. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

But I want to say, you know, staying informed is really itself a type of agency. It can seem so overwhelming. There's so much going on. You may say, like, I'm not a politics person, I'm not in an environmental nonprofit, I don't know the ins and outs of all these different questions. Um, and that's okay. It can feel really stressful.

Carolyn Woodard

But I do think that staying as informed as you can in ways that feel right to you actually can really help those communities that you care about and can help you also like understand your agency, the choices you're making, and the decisions that you're making and that in your community. People may have questions and you might be able to better answer them if you're better informed.

Carolyn Woodard

So that Rebel Alliance idea, like it is kind of corny, but um, I like it, you know, we're building something um that is not just accepting that this empire has all of the cards and is able to charge us whatever they want for the tools that they came up with using our knowledge base.

Carolyn Woodard

So um if you have questions about this, you want to share your ideas with me, um, you can always get in touch with me through this podcast, through our website, through our Reddit uh community at r/ nonprofit IT management.

Carolyn Woodard

On Friday, we will be back in your feed with another uh part two of our webinar that we just did on an AI maturity model for nonprofits. And I will be sharing what I'm reading in nonprofit AI. I had a ton more resources that I couldn't include in this episode. So I'll put those on LinkedIn. You can follow me there, and I will be back in your feed next Tuesday with another nonprofit AI check in. Until then, take care.