It's both.... mutual sharing of learning to improve the space without immediate expectation of a return to any one party.

You are assuming that the founder seeking to connect is less experienced and more desperate than the founder who is busy working on their idea and does not find the need to share anything.

Google shared the Attention paper with the world. What did OpenAI bring to the table? Tesla open sourced all their EV patents. What did BYD, KIA or Ford bring to the table?

These companies are stronger because they compete on their confidence to execute and because they make the entire ecosystem better.

In doing so they improved each other and the industry as whole. Hope this makes sense. It's not a zero sum game! :)