— Editor's note

Slower is the point.

Recul is an editorial publication about artificial intelligence. We step back from the noise to publish slow, sourced, perspective-driven reporting — four to six minutes at a time, one story at a time.

Why "Recul"

Recul is the French word for stepping back — the few feet of distance you put between yourself and a painting to actually see it. It's also what almost nobody does with AI news anymore.

The pace of AI is real. The pace of AI coverage — the threads, the takes, the model-card excerpts re-blogged through a dozen outlets before anyone reads the paper — is not. Most days, the noise outweighs the signal by an order of magnitude.

Recul exists on a single bet: that a smaller number of slower, sourced, perspective-driven stories is worth more than the firehose. One story at a time. Linked to primary sources. No newsletter, no comments, no infinite scroll.

The first ninety minutes of any AI news cycle is unreliable. We wait.

What we publish

The companies, the research, the infrastructure, and the policy shaping artificial intelligence right now. Frontier model releases. Government regulation. Compute and capital flows. Research that holds up beyond a press release.

What we don't:

  • Rumor, leaks-as-news, or vibes-based reporting.
  • Press releases dressed up as journalism.
  • Anything we can't link a primary source for.
  • Tweets turned into articles. (Tweets are evidence, not the story.)

How we report

  • Every claim is footnoted to a primary source we read, linked inline.
  • Breaking news is held for a few hours and then reported once the dust settles.
  • We say what we don't know. Confidence intervals belong in articles.
  • No sponsored content. No embargoed releases on someone else's timeline. No interviews we can't quote on the record.

AI in the editorial pipeline

It would be strange not to address this on an AI news site: we use AI in production. The honest accounting:

  • AI-assisted: research, source-finding, draft scaffolding, fact extraction, copyedit, and image generation.
  • Human: what's actually worth covering, framing, voice, structure, whether a claim survives scrutiny, and final sign-off.

Every story is read end-to-end by a human before it goes live. We mention this because we'd notice if every other AI-adjacent publication didn't.

How to read Recul