The IEEE FP16 format is what is useful in graphics applications, e.g. for storing color values. The Google BF16 format is useful strictly only for machine lear

The IEEE FP16 format is what is useful in graphics applications, e.g. for storing color values. The Google BF16 format is useful strictly only for machine learning/AI applications, because its low precision is insufficient for anything else. BF16 has very low precision, but an exponent range equal to FP32, which makes overflows and underflows less likely.