I have been researching the open AI lab model where engineers contribute voluntarily to real ML projects under a company or community umbrella.
For those who have contributed to organizations like EleutherAI, OpenMined, Hugging Face, Allen AI, or similar, I would love to hear your honest experience.
Specifically trying to understand three things:
What made you decide to contribute in the first place?
What kept you engaged or made you eventually stop?
What did you get out of it, reputation, learning, career opportunities, or nothing?
Not looking for promotional answers. Honest experiences including negative ones are more useful to me right now.