Although we achieved a formidable score with the preceding MLP, our result does not hold up to state-of-the-art results. Currently, the best result has close to 99.8% accuracy—better than human performance! This is why, nowadays, the task of classifying handwritten digits is largely regarded as solved.

To get closer to the state-of-the-art results, we need to use state-of-the-art techniques. Thus, we return to Keras.