diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 3f443983383..fc64f02e4fe 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -157,6 +157,8 @@ accelerate launch --multi_gpu --num_processes 2 examples/nlp_example.py
 
 To learn more, check the CLI documentation available [here](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/package_reference/cli).
 
+Or view the configuration zoo [here](https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate/blob/main/examples/config_yaml_templates/)
+
 ## Launching multi-CPU run using MPI
 
 🤗 Here is another way to launch multi-CPU run using MPI. You can learn how to install Open MPI on [this page](https://www.open-mpi.org/faq/?category=building#easy-build). You can use Intel MPI or MVAPICH as well.
@@ -256,7 +258,7 @@ pip install accelerate
 - multi-GPU on several nodes (machines)
 - TPU
 - FP16/BFloat16 mixed precision
-- FP8 mixed precision with [Transformer Engine](https://github.com/NVIDIA/TransformerEngine)
+- FP8 mixed precision with [Transformer Engine](https://github.com/NVIDIA/TransformerEngine) or [MS-AMP](https://github.com/Azure/MS-AMP/)
 - DeepSpeed support (Experimental)
 - PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) support (Experimental)
 - Megatron-LM support (Experimental)
diff --git a/docs/source/quicktour.md b/docs/source/quicktour.md
index 38929ec8031..fd571c861b3 100644
--- a/docs/source/quicktour.md
+++ b/docs/source/quicktour.md
@@ -53,6 +53,8 @@ accelerate launch path_to_script.py --args_for_the_script
 
 To learn more, check out the [Launch distributed code](basic_tutorials/launch) tutorial for more information about launching your scripts.
 
+We also have a [configuration zoo](https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate/blob/main/examples/config_yaml_templates) which showcases a number of premade **minimal** example configurations for a variety of setups you can run.
+
 ## Adapt training code
 
 The next main feature of Accelerate is the [`Accelerator`] class which adapts your PyTorch code to run on different distributed setups.
diff --git a/examples/README.md b/examples/README.md
index 5060c9ad733..27938cd7f97 100644
--- a/examples/README.md
+++ b/examples/README.md
@@ -208,23 +208,13 @@ To run it in each of these various modes, use the following commands:
 
 - [huggan project](https://github.com/huggingface/community-events/tree/main/huggan)
 
+
 ### Using AWS SageMaker integration
 - [Examples showcasing AWS SageMaker integration of 🤗 Accelerate.](https://github.com/pacman100/accelerate-aws-sagemaker)
 
-
-## Simple Multi-GPU Hardware Launcher
-
-[multigpu_remote_launcher.py](./multigpu_remote_launcher.py) is a minimal script that demonstrates launching accelerate
-on multiple remote GPUs, and with automatic hardware environment and dependency setup for reproducibility. You can
-easily customize the training function used, training arguments, hyperparameters, and type of compute hardware, and then
-run the script to automatically launch multi GPU training on remote hardware.
-
-This script uses [Runhouse](https://github.com/run-house/runhouse) to launch on self-hosted hardware (e.g. in your own
-cloud account or on-premise cluster) but there are other options for running remotely as well. Runhouse can be installed
-with `pip install runhouse`, and you can refer to
-[hardware setup](https://runhouse-docs.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/api/python/cluster.html#hardware-setup)
-for hardware setup instructions, or this
-[Colab tutorial](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1qVwYyLTCPYPSdz9ZX7BZl9Qm0A3j7RJe) for a more in-depth walkthrough.
+## Configuration zoo
+In [/config_yaml_templates](./config_yaml_templates/) we have a variety of *minimal* `config.yaml` templates and examples to help you learn
+how to create your own configuration files depending on the scenario. 
 
 ## SLURM Scripts 
 In [/slurm/submit_multigpu.sh](./slurm/submit_multigpu.sh) and [/slurm/submit_multinode.sh](./slurm/submit_multinode.sh) we present two scripts for running the examples on a machine with [SLURM](https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html) workload manager. 
@@ -251,6 +241,20 @@ export PYTHONPATH=/home/nct01/nct01328/transformers-in-supercomputers:$PYTHONPAT
 export GPUS_PER_NODE=4
 ```
 
+## Simple Multi-GPU Hardware Launcher (using an external platform)
+
+[multigpu_remote_launcher.py](./multigpu_remote_launcher.py) is a minimal script that demonstrates launching accelerate
+on multiple remote GPUs, and with automatic hardware environment and dependency setup for reproducibility. You can
+easily customize the training function used, training arguments, hyperparameters, and type of compute hardware, and then
+run the script to automatically launch multi GPU training on remote hardware.
+
+This script uses [Runhouse](https://github.com/run-house/runhouse) to launch on self-hosted hardware (e.g. in your own
+cloud account or on-premise cluster) but there are other options for running remotely as well. Runhouse can be installed
+with `pip install runhouse`, and you can refer to
+[hardware setup](https://runhouse-docs.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/api/python/cluster.html#hardware-setup)
+for hardware setup instructions, or this
+[Colab tutorial](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1qVwYyLTCPYPSdz9ZX7BZl9Qm0A3j7RJe) for a more in-depth walkthrough.
+
 ## Finer Examples
 
 While the first two scripts are extremely barebones when it comes to what you can do with accelerate, more advanced features are documented in two other locations.
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/README.md b/examples/config_yaml_templates/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..4cfd56f2ac5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+# Config Zoo
+
+This folder contains a variety of minimal configurations for `Accelerate` achieving certain goals. You can use these 
+direct config YAML's, or build off of them for your own YAML's.
+
+These are highly annoted versions, aiming to teach you what each section does.
+
+Each config can be run via `accelerate launch --config_file {file} run_me.py`
+
+`run_me.py` will then print out how the current environment is setup (the contents of the `AcceleratorState`)
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/deepspeed.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/deepspeed.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..5efddd05245
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/deepspeed.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+# Similar to FSDP, we set the distributed type as DEEPSPEED
+distributed_type: DEEPSPEED
+# With DeepSpeed, we utilize a deepspeed config file for the entire configuration
+deepspeed_config:
+  # Can also be any of the config json's in accelerate/examples/deepspeed_config_templates
+  deepspeed_config_file: ../deepspeed_config_templates/zero_stage1_config.json
+  # If using ZeRO-3 and wanting to load big models in, this should be set to `true` so 
+  # `transformers` uses the right `init` function
+  zero3_init_flag: false # true 
+
+# Finally we need to specify the number of GPUs to use
+num_processes: 2
+# Optionally we can set the mixed precision now instead of in the deepspeed config file,
+# however this requires the `fp16` and `bf16` options to be set to `auto` in the deepspeed config file
+# mixed_precision: "bf16"
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/fp8.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/fp8.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..4e81ac8e9fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/fp8.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+# This config template simply setups up the TransformersEngine config (and a config for a single GPU),
+# this can interop with the other configs in this folder
+distributed_type: "NO"
+mixed_precision: "fp8"
+# Then we specify the fp8 configuration:
+fp8_config:
+  backend: TE # Can be TE | MS-AMP
+  # The following are TE specific arguments.
+  # See https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/transformer-engine/user-guide/api/common.html#common-api for more details
+  amax_history_length: 1024
+  fp8_format: E4M3
+  interval: 1
+  margin: 0
+  override_linear_precision: false
+  # Generally this should always be set to `false` to have the most realistic fp8 eval performance
+  use_autocast_during_eval: false
+  # If using MS-AMP, we ignore all of the prior and set a opt_level
+  #opt_level: O1
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/fsdp.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/fsdp.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..07c3e1b83e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/fsdp.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+# Since we are doing FSDP (even though it's multi-GPU), we need to specify the distributed type as FSDP
+distributed_type: FSDP
+# Can be one of "no", "fp16", or "bf16" (see `transformer_engine.yaml` for `fp8`, but it works for FSDP as well)
+mixed_precision: 'bf16'
+# Specify the number of GPUs to use
+num_processes: 2
+# Then we can specify the FSDP config
+fsdp_config:
+  fsdp_activation_checkpointing: false
+  fsdp_auto_wrap_policy: TRANSFORMER_BASED_WRAP
+  fsdp_backward_prefetch: BACKWARD_PRE
+  fsdp_cpu_ram_efficient_loading: true
+  fsdp_forward_prefetch: false
+  fsdp_offload_params: false
+  fsdp_sharding_strategy: FULL_SHARD
+  fsdp_state_dict_type: SHARDED_STATE_DICT
+  fsdp_sync_module_states: true
+  fsdp_use_orig_params: true
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_gpu.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_gpu.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..9d6c12bf667
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_gpu.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+# Specify distributed_type as `MULTI_GPU` for DDP
+distributed_type: "MULTI_GPU"
+# Can be one of "no", "fp16", or "bf16" (see `transformer_engine.yaml` for `fp8`)
+mixed_precision: "bf16"
+# Specify the number of GPUs to use
+num_processes: 2
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_node.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_node.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..b76699f849c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/multi_node.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+# This config template is for a multi-node setup. This assumes DDP, but can be interop'd with the other configs in this folder
+# Generally it's recommended to look at the SLURM config template for a more robust multi-node setup
+distributed_type: MULTI_GPU
+# We need to specify the current machine's rank
+machine_rank: 0
+# We then need to specify the IP address and port of the main process
+main_process_ip: '1234'
+main_process_port: 9999
+# We need to specify the number of machines
+num_machines: 2
+# We need to specify the *total* number of processes
+num_processes: 8
+# And then we need to specify how rdvz comms will be handled 
+rdzv_backend: static # or c10d
+# If the compute nodes are on the same network (cloud will more than likely be false)
+same_network: false
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/run_me.py b/examples/config_yaml_templates/run_me.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..70bed48cc0f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/run_me.py
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+# Copyright 2024 The HuggingFace Team. All rights reserved.
+#
+# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
+# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
+# You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+# limitations under the License.
+
+"""
+A base script which outputs the accelerate config for the given environment
+"""
+from accelerate import Accelerator
+
+
+accelerator = Accelerator()
+
+accelerator.print(f"Accelerator state from the current environment:\n{accelerator.state}")
+if accelerator.fp8_recipe_handler is not None:
+    accelerator.print(f"FP8 config:\n{accelerator.fp8_recipe_handler}")
+accelerator.end_training()
diff --git a/examples/config_yaml_templates/single_gpu.yaml b/examples/config_yaml_templates/single_gpu.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..3d1a81cedaf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/examples/config_yaml_templates/single_gpu.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+# Since this is single GPU, we don't need distributed training
+distributed_type: "NO"
+# Can be one of "no", "fp16", or "bf16" (see `transformer_engine.yaml` for `fp8`)
+mixed_precision: "bf16"
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/src/accelerate/commands/config/config_args.py b/src/accelerate/commands/config/config_args.py
index f6ee4deb534..3039e45054b 100644
--- a/src/accelerate/commands/config/config_args.py
+++ b/src/accelerate/commands/config/config_args.py
@@ -99,13 +99,17 @@ def _convert_enums(value):
         result = {k: v for k, v in result.items() if v is not None}
         return result
 
-    @classmethod
-    def from_json_file(cls, json_file=None):
-        json_file = default_json_config_file if json_file is None else json_file
-        with open(json_file, encoding="utf-8") as f:
-            config_dict = json.load(f)
+    @staticmethod
+    def process_config(config_dict):
+        """
+        Processes `config_dict` and sets default values for any missing keys
+        """
         if "compute_environment" not in config_dict:
             config_dict["compute_environment"] = ComputeEnvironment.LOCAL_MACHINE
+        if "distributed_type" not in config_dict:
+            raise ValueError("A `distributed_type` must be specified in the config file.")
+        if "num_processes" not in config_dict and config_dict["distributed_type"] == DistributedType.NO:
+            config_dict["num_processes"] = 1
         if "mixed_precision" not in config_dict:
             config_dict["mixed_precision"] = "fp16" if ("fp16" in config_dict and config_dict["fp16"]) else None
         if "fp16" in config_dict:  # Convert the config to the new format.
@@ -119,6 +123,14 @@ def from_json_file(cls, json_file=None):
             config_dict["debug"] = False
         if "enable_cpu_affinity" not in config_dict:
             config_dict["enable_cpu_affinity"] = False
+        return config_dict
+
+    @classmethod
+    def from_json_file(cls, json_file=None):
+        json_file = default_json_config_file if json_file is None else json_file
+        with open(json_file, encoding="utf-8") as f:
+            config_dict = json.load(f)
+        config_dict = cls.process_config(config_dict)
         extra_keys = sorted(set(config_dict.keys()) - set(cls.__dataclass_fields__.keys()))
         if len(extra_keys) > 0:
             raise ValueError(
@@ -138,23 +150,7 @@ def from_yaml_file(cls, yaml_file=None):
         yaml_file = default_yaml_config_file if yaml_file is None else yaml_file
         with open(yaml_file, encoding="utf-8") as f:
             config_dict = yaml.safe_load(f)
-        if "compute_environment" not in config_dict:
-            config_dict["compute_environment"] = ComputeEnvironment.LOCAL_MACHINE
-        if "mixed_precision" not in config_dict:
-            config_dict["mixed_precision"] = "fp16" if ("fp16" in config_dict and config_dict["fp16"]) else None
-        if isinstance(config_dict["mixed_precision"], bool) and not config_dict["mixed_precision"]:
-            config_dict["mixed_precision"] = "no"
-        if "fp16" in config_dict:  # Convert the config to the new format.
-            del config_dict["fp16"]
-        if "dynamo_backend" in config_dict:  # Convert the config to the new format.
-            dynamo_backend = config_dict.pop("dynamo_backend")
-            config_dict["dynamo_config"] = {} if dynamo_backend == "NO" else {"dynamo_backend": dynamo_backend}
-        if "use_cpu" not in config_dict:
-            config_dict["use_cpu"] = False
-        if "debug" not in config_dict:
-            config_dict["debug"] = False
-        if "enable_cpu_affinity" not in config_dict:
-            config_dict["enable_cpu_affinity"] = False
+        config_dict = cls.process_config(config_dict)
         extra_keys = sorted(set(config_dict.keys()) - set(cls.__dataclass_fields__.keys()))
         if len(extra_keys) > 0:
             raise ValueError(
diff --git a/src/accelerate/utils/dataclasses.py b/src/accelerate/utils/dataclasses.py
index 1151cd73fda..0f35a294736 100644
--- a/src/accelerate/utils/dataclasses.py
+++ b/src/accelerate/utils/dataclasses.py
@@ -1338,10 +1338,11 @@ class FullyShardedDataParallelPlugin:
         },
     )
     sync_module_states: bool = field(
-        default=False,
+        default=None,
         metadata={
             "help": "Whether each individually wrapped FSDP unit should broadcast module parameters from rank 0 "
-            "to ensure they are the same across all ranks after initialization. Defaults to `True`"
+            "to ensure they are the same across all ranks after initialization. Defaults to `False` unless "
+            "`cpu_ram_efficient_loading` is `True`, then will be forcibly enabled."
         },
     )
     forward_prefetch: bool = field(