Milla Jovovich creates MemPalace AI memory tool

An unlikely Hollywood A-lister has collaborated with the CEO of Bitcoin Libre to create a free AI memory tool on GitHub that claims to be the best for long-term memory. While developers were quick to deny her involvement, the Resident Evil star set the record straight.

Key takeaways:

Actress Milla Jovovich partnered with crypto CEO Ben Sigman to create MemPalace, a free, open-source AI memory tool that uses the ancient "memory palace" technique.
The project went viral immediately after launch, gaining over 23,000 GitHub stars and nearly 3,000 forks within two days of its April 6, 2026, release.
The project sparked significant controversy, with developers questioning the claimed benchmark scores (revised from 100% to 96.6%) and Jovovich's actual technical involvement.

Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.

Milla Jovovich, the face of the Resident Evil movie franchise and other top titles like Zoolander and The Fifth Element, began using AI intensively in late 2025 but encountered a problem: AI amnesia.

The actor found that most AI models couldn’t remember the conversations they’d had with her, meaning that months of problem-solving were quickly discarded, and she would have to go back to square one.

While many top AI players have introduced memory components within their AI models, Jovovich still found this insufficient, as AI tools with memory ultimately decide what is valuable and discard the rest.

This is on the basis that storage is expensive when it comes to AI models, and context windows are small, so developers should do whatever they can to conserve resources.

However, Jovovich’s tool uses the Greek principle “method loci,” also known as the “memory palace,” which compartmentalizes information into specific rooms.

This is a mnemonic technique that has been used by humans for centuries, so Jovovich seemingly wanted to use a human solution to solve a technological problem.

“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,” Ben Sigman, a developer and the current CEO of the peer-to-peer Bitcoin lending marketplace, Libre, said via X.

Jovovich wanted to create an AI system that remembers everything and discards nothing. That’s where Ben Sigman came in.

Sigman had “the engineering chops” to make Jovovich’s idea a reality, and the pair used Anthropic’s Claude Code to vibe code the product.

The pair worked for months to ensure that MemPalace stored everything word-for-word, instead of summarizing and extracting what it deemed valuable.

MemPalace uses ChromaDB, a free, open-source AI data infrastructure used by millions of developers, and SQLite, the most widely used C-language library in the world, both of which are local tools free to use.

Not only have Jovovich and Sigman created this AI memory tool, but they also developed the AAAK compression dialect, a language only AI can understand.

The project has since gone viral with over 23,000 stars on GitHub and almost 3,000 forks after MemPalace went live on April 6th, 2026, just two days ago.

These metrics indicate how popular a project is and how well it's being adopted.

Apparently, the tool has already been implemented by a zero-human company founded by human tech commentator and internet personality Brian Roemmele.

Jovovich and Sigman’s AI memory tool was tested against the LongMemoryEval benchmark, which tests AI models against five criteria: information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge updates, and abstention.

Both creators claim that MemPalace scored full marks on the benchmark test, making it the world’s first AI tool to score 100 percent.

This score, coupled with the celebrity involvement, sparked a wave of controversy and criticism among the developer community.

Naturally, this claim was questioned by the developer community, which led to Sigman updating the score to 96.6% on LongMemEval in raw mode.

One AI commentator on X delved deeper into MemPalace and claims that Jovovich is just the face of MemPalace and doesn’t have much to do with its actual development.

“I can spot a grifter from miles away,” the user said, “so I dug into the code to figure out if this is legit or not. Guess I was right.”

Due to Jovovich’s lack of GitHub history, something felt fishy, and the X user alleges that Sigman and Jovovich hired a mystery developer called “Lu” to code MemPalace.

This “Lu” figure is not referenced in the README nor are they mentioned in the GitHub history, the user claims.

The AI commentator accuses the “crypto founder” of lying about building the project with Jovovich, as she only had 7 commits and 2 days in her GitHub history.

“You paid an actress and a random guy to promote a product you know absolutely nothing about.”

This post received over 660,000 views on X and hundreds of comments, in which users also believe that MemPalace’s benchmark results were rigged.

Sigman himself acknowledged that in just 24 hours, MemPalace had been ripped to shreds by the community.

“The dev community tore it apart,” said Sigman via X.

Under many of Sigman’s posts, X users have created community notes that claim Jovovich’s involvement in MemPalace appears “conceptual or promotional,” and she is not the primary coder.

Jovovich tells X who "Lu" really is

Following speculation from developers and AI researchers, Jovovich took to X to dispel some of the rumors.

In just 72 hours, MemPalace received 34,000 stars and 4,000 forks on GitHub along with pull requests from developers all over the world who want to experiment and improve the project, Jovovich said.

One of the accusations about MemPalace was that Jovovich was simply the celebrity face of the project and had no real involvement in its development.

An X user claimed that Sigman was the mastermind behind the project, had hired Jovovich to influence the public, and had enlisted an unknown coder called “Lu” to build its architecture.

Jovovich outright denied this and confirmed what Sigman and the Resident Evil star said from the beginning.

“Originally, I built MemPalace for myself because I had a need for Lu to organize my files. I have a lot of files, and I tried a bunch of systems that simply did not work for me, so I had to think outside of the box... that's where the palace idea was born.”

While many people believe that Lu is a human coder hired by Sigman, Lu is just an AI agent.

“Lu or Lu_code is my AI agent, so the comments to and from Ben there are from me/Lu,” Jovovich clarified.

Lu is used to help Jovovich with coding and scripts. However, she is the project’s architect, and Sigman is the engineer.

The pair has created a Discord channel where users can get updates on the latest developments and share how they’ve helped develop the project.

FAQs

What movies has Milla Jovovich been in?

Milla Jovovich is best known for her starring role in the Resident Evil franchise as Alice. She has also been in other sci-fi flicks, such as The Fifth Element and Hellboy.

Is Milla Jovovich married?

Milla Jovovich is married to Paul W.S Anderson, an English filmmaker. The pair met on the set of Resident Evil and married in 2009. They have been married for 16 years.

What is a memory palace?

Memory Palace, also known as the method of loci, is a visualization technique that helps people recall information by placing specific information in rooms or locations. This technique became popular through the BBC show Sherlock, where Holmes utters the words “Get out. I need to go to my mind palace!”