I don't know about that, to date genetic engineering consisted of taking DNA from one organism, isolating a desired trait from another organism and using a gun or splicer to "inject" that code into preexisting DNA. These guys scaffold the DNA from the basic building blocks. There is a huge difference. Personally to me they are both artificial life as neither occurred via random selection, it is just one used a current organisms DNA as the building block, while the other used the bare elements to put together all of the DNA. The value of the second approach is that you don't get all of the junk that comes with harvested DNA you only get what you specify.
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I don't know about that, to date genetic engineering consisted of taking DNA from one organism, isolating a desired trait from another organism and using a gun or splicer to "inject" that code into preexisting DNA. These guys scaffold the DNA from the basic building blocks. There is a huge difference. Personally to me they are both artificial life as neither occurred via random selection, it is just one used a current organisms DNA as the building block, while the other used the bare elements to put together all of the DNA. The value of the second approach is that you don't get all of the junk that comes with harvested DNA you only get what you specify.