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
Audience map
3 communities- Long-form documentary
- Weeknight comedy
- Live sport
Meet NSL-1
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.
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
Find the next one
Eight histories.
One next item each.
Every clue is what somebody did. The answer is what they reached for next, hidden in the grid, and the history is enough to work it out: the rest of a director’s run, the writer behind the last three, the tool the previous purchases were building towards. Mark the first letter and the last to claim one.
Watched
Breaking Bad · Better Call Saul (8)
Watched
Arrival · Blade Runner 2049 · Sicario (4)
Watched
Black Mirror · Devs · Mr. Robot (9)
Watched
Planet Earth · Blue Planet II · Frozen Planet (9)
Purchased
Espresso machine · Burr grinder · Milk jug (6)
Watched
The Wire · Generation Kill · Show Me a Hero (5)
Read
Dune · Neuromancer · Snow Crash (8)
Purchased
Cast-iron skillet · Carbon steel chef's knife · Dutch oven (9)
From the blog
Field notes
Running at scale across media, commerce, and publishing
Index frozen 23 August 2026 · 23 systems measured



