A checkpoint variant is usually a checkpoint whose weights are:  
- Stored in a different floating point type, such as [torch.float16](https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/tensors.html#data-types), because it only requires half the bandwidth and storage to download. You can't use this variant if you're continuing training or using a CPU.
- Non-exponential mean averaged (EMA) weights which shouldn't be used for inference. You should use this variant to continue finetuning a model.  
> [!TIP]