Solved by jphoward in post #11 
              
              
                You can see the source code for save here: 


(@ptrblck you linked to v0.7 - you can see the ‘old’ in the path to it; v1 is in ‘fastai’, not ‘old’) 
As you can see from the source, if with_opt is false, then the saved file is just the model state_dict; if it’s true, it’s a dictionary with the state_…