Milla Jovovich, the actress widely recognized for her roles in The Fifth Element and the Resident Evil franchise, has turned her attention to artificial intelligence. In a video posted to Instagram on Monday, she announced the creation of MemPalace, an open-source AI memory and retrieval system. Jovovich said the project emerged over several months while she was working on a separate, unnamed gaming project, during which she encountered persistent problems with how existing AI systems handle information storage and retrieval.
According to Jovovich, those technical obstacles prompted her to develop a new approach. She said she was responsible for the concept and overall architecture of the system, while Ben Sigman, a software developer and CEO of Bitcoin lending platform Libre Labs, handled the engineering. Sigman noted on X that MemPalace accumulated 10,000 stars on GitHub and 50 pull requests within 24 hours of its release, adding that there is “more to come.”
MemPalace draws on a mnemonic strategy rooted in ancient Greece known as the memory palace, or the “method of loci.” The technique involves mentally associating pieces of information with specific locations inside an imagined space, allowing a person to retrieve that information by mentally navigating through the environment. Jovovich said her interest in the concept grew out of research into how memory experts store and recall information.
Major AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, have introduced memory features that allow their assistants to retain user preferences and prior context across conversations. Sigman has described MemPalace as distinct from those approaches, explaining that rather than routing data to a background agent in the cloud, the system mines conversations locally and organizes them into a structured palace. This local processing is presented as a key differentiator from existing commercial solutions.
Sean Ren, a professor of computer science at USC and CEO of Sahara AI, described MemPalace as a different method for structuring how AI systems organize information. He noted that because it functions as a general approach, scaling it should not present significant difficulties, and it could potentially be compatible with a range of AI frameworks. However, Ren cautioned that performance claims have not yet been validated beyond controlled benchmark experiments and may not fully reflect real-world conditions.
“We need to wait to see how the community reacts when deploying it in real systems,” Ren said. Jovovich acknowledged that Anthropic‘s Claude played a role in shaping the project after Sigman introduced her to the developer tool. She said the experience reinforced her belief that human creativity remains the driving force behind meaningful advances in AI, stating that AI draws only on what already exists and that it is the people directing it who produce something genuinely new.
The system is currently available as an open-source project, and Jovovich has invited developers to download the code, run tests, and submit feedback. She framed community participation as essential to refining the tool and improving how information is stored over time. The project represents an unusual intersection of entertainment and software development, with Jovovich positioning herself as both a creative contributor and an advocate for human-led innovation in the AI space.
Originally reported by Decrypt.
