Precision, aiming those names refer to standard binary numeric types. IEEE754 16-bit floats carry 11 significant digits with absolute precision so by coverting

Precision, aiming those names refer to standard binary numeric types. IEEE754 16-bit floats carry 11 significant digits with absolute precision so by coverting to 8-bit integers you lose some of that. Depending on the distribution of the values in those floats you could be loosing a lot more detail then this would imply, which is the reason we use floating point numbers for anything in the first place (rather than using an int16 where you have greater precision at you maximum scale but much less at lower scales). So if the model is computed using float16s, distribute as-is and let the end user choose to user it like that or compromise for faster processing of there system can deal with many billions of int8s more effectively.