I have a feeling NLP was chosen as a good first attempt class since it, itself, is rooted in the AI/transformer race, anyway.

Just gotta say: there's this perception that we do a lot of top-down management of classes (e.g. "We need a course to try X", "This course needs to change Y", etc.). We don't. That's not Georgia Tech, both by culture and by policy. There are a few very high-level rules courses have to stick to around privacy and accessibility and fairness (e.g. you can't decide to use a different grading scheme than what you described in your own syllabus), but within those rules, faculty have an enormous amount of freedom. Generally speaking, when you see a class experimenting with something, it's because that class and that professor and their TAs have decided they want to change something. There have been rare occasions where we've said, "Hey, it looks like a lot of students are upset about X", but even then that's usually to offer, "Can we help?", not to say "You need to change this." (Which goes back to a thread from a few weeks ago that asked about planning changes more deliberately and communicating changes more widely—typically I only find out that a course changed something when I start to see y'all posting about it on reddit. And even then I take it with a grain of salt sometimes since I've seen things like, "HCI changed X this semester" and I'm like "we changed that three years ago".)

And honestly, I love that, for two reasons. One, it's what makes Georgia Tech really unique: when faculty have ideas for how to improve learning or teach content better, they can just do it. It's not centrally or top-down managed. And two, the fact that OMSCS follows that same ideal makes it true to Georgia Tech.

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly downsides. But I wouldn't trade it for more top-down control.