There are two important arguments for loading variants:  
- `torch_dtype` specifies the floating point precision of the loaded checkpoint. For example, if you want to save bandwidth by loading a fp16 variant, you should set `variant="fp16"` and `torch_dtype=torch.float16` to *convert the weights* to fp16. Otherwise, the fp16 weights are converted to the default fp32 precision.  
If you only set `torch_dtype=torch.float16`, the default fp32 weights are downloaded first and then converted to fp16.