Milla Jovovich co-creates open-source AI memory tool that goes viral on GitHub

Actress Milla Jovovich and engineer Ben Sigman released MemPalace on April 6, a free, MIT-licensed tool that gives large language models long-term memory across sessions.bitcoin
The system stores conversations verbatim in a local hierarchy inspired by the ancient Greek method of loci, claiming 96.6% on the LongMemEval benchmark versus roughly 85% for paid rivals.substack
Rapid popularity also drew criticism over Jovovich’s coding role and benchmark methodology, prompting Sigman to update the project’s reporting to clarify its scores.substack

Milla Jovovich Launches Open-Source AI Memory Tool MemPalace

Actress Milla Jovovich, known for her roles in the Resident Evil and Fifth Element franchises, has entered the AI development space with MemPalace, an open-source memory system she co-created with engineer Ben Sigman. The tool, released on April 6 under an MIT license, aims to solve what Jovovich calls “AI amnesia” — the tendency of large language models to forget prior conversations between sessions.bitcoin

How It Works

MemPalace stores conversations verbatim rather than relying on lossy summaries, organizing information into a hierarchy of “wings,” “rooms,” “halls,” and “drawers” inspired by the ancient Greek method of loci, a mnemonic technique used to memorize long speeches. Retrieval is handled locally through ChromaDB and SQLite, requiring no API keys or cloud services.instagram

“Instead of sending your data to a background agent in the cloud, it mines your conversations locally and organizes them into a palace — a structured architecture with wings, halls, and rooms that mirrors how human memory actually works,” Sigman wrote on X.cybernews

Jovovich said in an Instagram post that the idea came after months of frustration with AI file retrieval. “I wanted to create a new way to make filing and retrieving more intuitive,” she wrote, citing the memory techniques used by champions who memorize tens of thousands of decimal places of pi. The pair used Anthropic’s Claude Code to build the project, with Jovovich designing the concept and Sigman handling the engineering.bitcoin

Benchmarks and Backlash

The project reports 96.6% recall on the LongMemEval benchmark in raw retrieval mode and 100% in a hybrid pipeline using a lightweight reranking step, compared to roughly 85% for paid competitors Mem0 and Zep. The raw score was independently verified on an M2 Ultra machine, according to a user on Reddit.reddit

The project gained more than 23,000 GitHub stars and nearly 3,000 forks within two days of launch. But the rapid attention also drew scrutiny. Some developers questioned the benchmark claims and Jovovich’s actual coding contributions, noting she had only seven commits in her GitHub history. One widely viewed post on X accused the project of using a separate uncredited developer, prompting community notes on Sigman’s posts stating that Jovovich’s involvement “appears conceptual or promotional”.cybernews

Sigman acknowledged the criticism. “The dev community tore it apart,” he wrote on X, and updated the project’s benchmark reporting to clarify the 96.6% raw score versus the 100% hybrid figure. MemPalace supports Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor through the Model Context Protocol and is available on GitHub at no cost.instagram