>> MNIST is a dataset, VGG is a software model Strictly speaking, true. But one discovers early enough that you can screw up a number of things when training a

>> MNIST is a dataset, VGG is a software model Strictly speaking, true. But one discovers early enough that you can screw up a number of things when training a model on something as simple as MNIST and the model will still work, because there's so much redundancy, the correct layers will just train their way around the ones that don't really work. VGG trained for general purpose image classification with a decent sized input is a much better indicator of whether or not some ML hardware improvement is useful.