The similarity you see between this DeepMind project, the DARPA program, and research in Tenenbaum's lab is not incidental: there's a steady stream of crosstalk and cross-training between machine learning researchers who engineering artificial intelligences and cognitive scientists who reverse-engineer human intelligences. (Note, for example, that Peter Battaglia, one of the co-authors of this DeepMind project, was a postdoc with Tenenbaum.)
That scans with observations from recent text-to-image works where there often seems to be an insight or two either left without citation or citing an unpublished work that they used to avoid testing an (ultimately) incorrect hypothesis.
I have seen some suggest that this is basically Google “allowing” the competition to catch up just to beat them a few weeks later but generally it just seems like they’re kind of all chatting with each other in the background instead.
I recall Tenenbaum's lab had a similar paper a few years back.