Conversion from `bfloat16` to `float` and `double` is lossless. It seems natural to allow the conversion to be implicit, as the C++ language also support implicit conversion from a smaller to a larger floating point type.
Intel's OneDLL bfloat16 implementation also has an implicit `operator float()`: https://github.com/oneapi-src/oneDNN/blob/v1.5/src/common/bfloat16.hpp
Niels Dekker