In this post, I describe a mindset that is flawed, and yet helpful for choosing impactful technical AI safety research projects.

The mindset is this: future AI might look very different than AI today, but good ideas are universal. If you want to develop a method that will scale up to powerful future AI systems, your method should also scale down to MNIST. In other words, good ideas omniscale: they work well across all model sizes, domains, and training regimes.

The Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST): 70,000 images of handwritten digits, 28x28 pixels each (source: Wikipedia). You can fit the whole dataset and many models on a single GPU!

Putting the omniscaling mindset into practice is straightforward. Any time you come across a clever-sounding machine learning idea, ask: "can I apply this to MNIST?" If not, then it's not a good idea. If so, run an experiment to see if it works. If it doesn't, then it's not a good idea. If it does, then it might be a good idea, and you can continue as usual to more realistic experiments or theory.

In this post, I will:

1. Share how MNIST experiments have informed my [...]

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Outline:

(01:58 ) Applications to MNIST

(02:42 ) Gradient routing

(04:43 ) Distillation robustifies unlearning

(08:39 ) Subliminal learning

(10:37 ) Why you should do it on MNIST

(11:30 ) MNIST is not sufficient (and other tips)

(14:25 ) The omniscaling assumption is false

(17:09 ) Code and more ideas

(18:40 ) Closing thoughts

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 8th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4aeshNuEKF8Ak356D/omniscaling-to-mnist

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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