NSL-1: A RECOMMENDER YOU CAN SEE INSIDE
Most recommenders are a black box with a score coming out. NSL-1 is a foundation model with the lid off: the audience it has learned, the content it has read, and why any one result sits where it does.
Every leading architecture trained on your behaviour, promoted only when it beats the last one and rolled back when it stops. Then boost, suppress or pin whatever the business needs on top.
Deployed across media, commerce, and publishing
- Streaming
- Marketplace
- Publishing
- Retail media
- Music
- Games
- Classifieds
- News
- Podcasts
- Grocery
- Fashion
- Learning
Meet NSL-1
The foundational recommender
Understand your audience. Test the best models. Control every recommendation. NSL-1 is where each deployment starts - and behind it, a field of architectures measured against your own behaviour, so every surface runs whichever one wins.
Audience map
3 communities- Long-form documentary
- Weeknight comedy
- Live sport
A living map of your audience
Users, content, interests and behavioural clusters in one space you can actually look at. The communities in your data are found rather than defined, so the groups you did not know to look for turn up beside the ones you did.
Interests that change over time
Follow one person's interests as they move, and tell a settled taste apart from a single unusual session. Fragmented signals become one current picture of what somebody wants now - not an average of everything they have ever done.
Deep understanding of the content
Multimodal embeddings - TwelveLabs' Marengo, OpenAI, or your own - let ranking read scenes, actions, dialogue, sound, objects and themes rather than titles and tags. A new item can be placed the day it is published, with no interaction history at all.
The best model for your data
Collaborative, content-based, sequential, graph and generative architectures, trained on your actual behaviour and measured against each other on the same footing. Towards your outcome - watch time, completion, retention, purchases - not a fixed list of generic signals.
Automated testing, promotion and rollback
A candidate only goes live when it beats the incumbent on the agreed metrics and stays inside your quality, diversity, latency and cost guardrails. Shadow first, then a canary on a slice of traffic, with automatic rollback if the live numbers move the wrong way.
Complete control over what is recommended
Boost, suppress, exclude, pin or guarantee content, and set how hard an editorial decision pushes against personalisation. Every result traces back to the interests, interactions, similarities and rules that produced it.
Ranking that works on behalf of catalogues
Can your recommender do this?
Catalogues of any size can fine-tune NSL-1.
Content it can see
Scenes, dialogue, sound and objects read from the item itself, so a new one is rankable before it has a single view.
Model selection
Leading architectures trained on your behaviour and compared like for like, rather than one fixed model for every catalogue.
Safe releases
Shadow, then canary, then promotion - and automatic rollback the moment live performance drops.
Editorial control
Boost, suppress, pin or guarantee at request time, with the strength of the override set by you.
A traceable result
Every position decomposed into the interests, similarities and rules that produced it, with confidence attached.
Adaptive relevance, in the open
Most engines guess.
NSL-1 ranks.
This sandbox is a real feed. A cursor hovers, adds to cart, and favourites items, emitting weak and strong signals that re-rank the grid as they land. Switch between two users to see the same catalogue resolve to two different front pages.
Operate the whole system in natural language
An MCP server over the same control surface the console uses. An AI operator can inspect analytics and catalogue data, or work with pipelines, rules and training runs directly - no separate, weaker API to fall back on.
Read the docsRecommender Performance Index · v3.1
Put your catalogue to work
23 systems, scored against a frozen field on the same datasets and the same budget. Every number below is reproducible, and the ones we did not measure ourselves say so.
- 01ItemKNN → Multi-task ranker68.8
- 02ItemKNN → MLP ranker66.9
- 03VS-KNN65.2
- 04EASEᴿ64.5
- 05SASRec62.9
- 06VS-KNN → GBDT60.8
- 07Recency-Weighted Popularity60.2
- 08LightGCN59.8
- 09ItemKNN58.1
- 10BERT4Rec57.2
Where itemknn landedQuality only · cost and latency are never mixed in23 systems measured
From the blog
Field notes
Running at scale across media, commerce, and publishing
Index frozen 23 August 2026 · 23 systems measured



