It feels to me like a pretty natural thing to happen.

LLMs are pre-trained on human text. They've seen a million examples of someone who is stuck posting a "please help" message.

Just one agent needs to randomly stumble into the pattern of posting a message to Artifactory, by whatever means.

The next agent who sees that will be influenced by it. Agents imitate behavior, and here's a fresh piece of context showing them that posting messages is a thing that can be done.

Once they've started the rest are much more likely to join them.

The talk implies that unrelated agents volunteered their compute to help with other tasks, and the agents acted collectively in a way that seems weird without them being promoted in that way somehow.

If I ask claude to solve a problem and it stumbles across a Reddit thread saying “please help me find file xyz”, claude wouldn’t stop the task and start helping the other agent.