Is that the universe may not be seeded with biological Life, but with artificial life, mechanical descendants of now extinct biological species, what we now call AI.

Of course, who's to say what we call biological Life is, as you imply, an artifact, a 'machine' made up of carbon, water, and a handful of other elements. Maybe WE are artificial, and maybe we were placed here by some civilization, or some culture.

Perhaps the engineered Life as you call it is DNA itself. And maybe coded deep inside that DNA is the memory of that knowledge, that heritage, that origin which we call God.