EDIT: Alex replied below. For more details on quantisation see footnotes in our seminal work [1]

[1] https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

Is it common to describe ones own work as seminal?

In typical parlance today, "seminal" means "from which a bunch of important things have sprung" but I think there is an older definition which is simply "first".

Apologies, not my intention. I was also under the impression seminal could be used to mean ”first” in the succession of our works and this is what I had intended to communicate.

I don't think English is the author's first language.

It's their seminal language XD

As a non-native but long-term speaker of English, I understand "seminal" as in "their seminal work" as "groundbreaking" (and better to be avoided when referring to one's own work). But slips of the pen are inevitable, so no harm done.

Each cell has 12 8-bit channels, including rgb, so it is 96 bits.

The article says "our NCA model contains 16 channels. The first three are visible RGB channels and the rest we treat as latent channels which are visible to adjacent cells during update steps, but excluded from loss functions."

Thanks for noticing. This is a typo stemming from early experiments. We started out with 16 channels, but switched to 12 channels of state when this worked just as well. I've submitted a correction.