Thanks for the reply. I agree that setting the default to the GPU could be problematic, so I was careful in my original post not to suggest this.
I posted what’s below already in your linked GitHub issue, but posting it here too for the sake of continuity of this thread:
What about things like  torch.set_default_device()  and  torch.get_default_device(), where the default device type could initially be the CPU?
There is already similar functionality for dtypes with  torch.set_default_tensor_type()  and  torch.get_default_dtype() .