And what about the other boys who know a thing or two about deep learning? I don't see any of these people submitting MNIST to NIPS in 2017: Yousha Bengio, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Ng, Ross Girshick, Andrej Karpathy, Pedro Domingos, and the whole DeepMind crew.
So yes, submitting experiments on MNIST in 2017 should not be taken seriously.